Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 1Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism KritikOrientalism Kritik---1NC.........................................................................................................................................................................2

Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal.............................................................................................................................................................7Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal---Afghanistan....................................................................................................................................10Orientalism---Link---Afghanistan---Warlords........................................................................................................................................11Orientalism---Link---Iraq........................................................................................................................................................................12Orientalism---Link---Korea....................................................................................................................................................................13Orientalism---Link---Japan.....................................................................................................................................................................15Orientalism---Link---Orient as Other.....................................................................................................................................................18Orientalism---Link---U.S. Aid/Assistance/Control.................................................................................................................................19Orientalism---Link---“Middle East”.......................................................................................................................................................20Orientalism---Link---Middle East Peace................................................................................................................................................21Orientalism---Link---War on Terror........................................................................................................................................................22Orientalism---Link---War on Terror........................................................................................................................................................23Orientalism---Link---“Terrorism”...........................................................................................................................................................24Orientalism---Link---Terrorism---Language...........................................................................................................................................25

Orientalism---Alternative........................................................................................................................................................................26Orientalism---Alternative---AT: No Action............................................................................................................................................27

Orientalism---2NC---AT: Perm...............................................................................................................................................................29Orientalism---2NC---AT: Perm...............................................................................................................................................................30Orientalism---2NC AT: “They Want Withdrawal”..................................................................................................................................31

Orientalism---Framework---AT: “Policy Relevance”.............................................................................................................................32

***Orientalism Aff ................................................................................................................................................................................ 33 Aff---Orientalism---Perm Solvency........................................................................................................................................................34Aff---Orientalism---Link Turn/Perm Solvency.......................................................................................................................................35Aff---Orientalism---No Impact...............................................................................................................................................................36Aff---Orientalism---Alternative Doesn’t Solve......................................................................................................................................37

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 2Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism Kritik---1NC The affirmative is trapped within the mindset of Orientalism – the idea that the world is divided into two distinct parts – the rational, saving West; and the barbarian, violent East. The affirmative empowers a new Orientalism – a view of the world where the West is inherently superior, and in the name of world peace colonize and wage war upon the East.Crooke ‘6, is a British diplomat Crooke was a Middle East advisor to Javier Solana, High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union (CFSP) from 1997 to 2003, 2006 [August 31, Alastair, “The "new Orientalism"” http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/inside.php?id=604 Download Date: July 13, 2010]

It's unconscious. It slips out almost inadvertently. It is not deliberate but, rather, a reflex: an Israeli commentator discusses options for clearing Hizballah from the area south of the Litani River in the context of the war in Lebanon. After reviewing the options he adds, in an almost despairing note, that probably whatever Israel does, almost certainly a "Hizballah terrorist will pop up somewhere on the back of a donkey with a rocket." The imagery is clear, but paradoxical. Clear because his report implies a grudging and bemused respect for a foe that unexpectedly is not being crushed by the Israeli onslaught (as every western and Israeli analyst had assumed), paradoxical, because whatever the force that was frustrating this mighty military machine, it was certainly something more than "a man on a donkey". Why the donkey? Because this foremost proponent of modern asymmetrical guerrilla warfare--Hizballah--must nevertheless somehow be associated with obscurantism, with a reaction against western modernity and a desire for a return to a pre-modern age. It's just how we see things. Edward Said rightly identified this western unconscious prejudice as "Orientalism". He suggested that the West sees the Orient as that mysterious "Other" that eludes rational analysis. Western academics and observers continue to see the Orient, and to define it, in polar opposites: we in the West are rational, the Orient is violent and inexplicable; we are moderate, they are extreme; we practice good administration, they live under oppression and tyranny. This flawed western analysis is entirely self-serving: the language of Orientalism, Edward Said noted, was a construct of power. For the previous 300 years, Europeans have regarded the Treaty of Westphalia (an agreement that shattered the Christian "caliphate" in secular nation states) as laying the foundations of modernity. The separation of church and state, the belief in the inevitability of progress through science, a faith in reason as a solution of social problems, everything that we think of as the "Enlightenment" ideal, became our mantra however much European reality differed from this ideal. The Enlightenment grew from a simple concept to become, irretrievably, a synonym for "modernity" itself; the Orient became its antithesis. The ideals we believe are reflected in the Enlightenment became the device that allowed us to use the language of European modernity not only as a tool to "domesticate" the Orient but also as an interpretative template from which to offer a critique of the Orient's "backwardness". The Enlightenment mindset of European modernity became sedimented in western thinking at the same time that it served western colonial and economic interests. In the years since Edward Said published his classic, the West has elevated Orientalism into something more serious: an inexorable self-fulfilling reality. The global "war on terror" has allowed western leaders to cast "our" struggle as one for civilization itself--"we" have values, they have none, we want to spread democracy, they hate our freedoms. The West is now defined by its opposition to terrorism and as a defender of civilization. The war on terrorism has transformed orientalism , from a European-based vision of modernity that could be used to "domesticate" non-Europeans, into a program that establishes a frontier between "Civilization" and "the new Barbarism". The new "Orientalism" offers us new political tools. Since the "new barbarians" live outside of civilization, civilized rules no longer apply to them: if "they" win elections they can still not be part of "us"--office holders and parliamentarians can be abducted and interned without a murmur; members of "barbarian" movements can be arrested and taken away for imprisonment and torture in other countries, and barbarian leaders, whether or not legitimately elected, can be assassinated at the pleasure of western leaders. They "abduct" us, we "arrest" them. The underpinning of our worldview is based on our idea of what constitutes the legitimate use of power--and, therefore, on the use of violence. It is the bedrock of the Enlightenment. Violence practiced by the nation state is legitimate; violence used by non-state actors is a threat to civilization and the existing world order. The barbarians do not have resistance movements, they are not for liberation, and they are not fighting oppression. To admit so is to admit that we are oppressors, and that cannot be. They are not fighting for their homes: they are "unauthorized armed groups". Non-state actors who use violence--defined now as "terrorists" in the new lexicon of the Bush-Blair world view--face a double proscription: not only are they outside of civilization and undeserving of having civilized standards applied to them (such as respect elected representatives), they are excluded from international law too. Their challenge to "our" Westphalian rules on the use of violence permits us to cast them as barbarians and outlaws. Nor are we constrained by our own rules of war in the military struggle to be waged against them. Why are we bombing them? Because they don't have our values. "As these "Others"--these barbarians--find themselves isolated and excluded from civilization, as well as from the safeguards of " AND international law, they respond by assuming the characteristics we attribute to them. If we do not apply civilized standards to them, and use unrestrained military force against them, is it any wonder that they respond in kind? And so this "new Orientalism" becomes self-fulfilling: since their violence is "terrorism" and our violence is "self-defense," we propound a reasonable solution--we get to keep our "guns, but they must disarm "

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 3Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism Kritik---1NC Don’t be fooled – the Affirmative’s withdrawal of the US military is not the constriction of empire – it is rather the American way of Orientalism – to colonize a country, and leave as soon as possible without taking responsibility for governing. In fact, quick withdrawal is the modus operandi of American Imperalism Lite – the attempt to justify imperialism by invoking the occurrences of frequent ‘withdrawals’Jackie Assayag ‘7 CNRS, Maison Frangaise, Oxford, etnografica . maio de 2007 . 11 (I): 253-269 (East and West. Orientalism, war and the colonial present)

Michael Ignatieff has described (in an uncritical manner) the North American project as an "imperialism lite", a hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence relieved of the weight of direct administration and of the risks entailed in the day to day management of politics.^" Thus the "burden" of Kipling would have become lighter in passing from England to the United States, for it is true that the task and the message have in the meantime changed. Today, it is a question of conducting a "war against terrorism". To declare war on individuals and forces liberated from existing legal institutions, or eluding ethical control, proves to be an interminable task. The actors involved in this type of violence in fact freely determine the arms and the targets of their choice, independently of state constraint. Contrary to war according to Clausewitz, the "crusade against terrorism" will not be able to triumph, for it is " the continuation of political absence by other means ".2' Because of this lack of global politics and because of the deficiency of a world political authority, the multiplication of violent conflicts can be expected. De facto, one has fallen back on the war against "rogue" or "delinquent" states. The declared imperial will is to destroy them with a view to reforming them according to the advantages of liberal capitalism and of democracy for the benefit of the greatest number. The intention is even to impose the respect for human rights and related cosmopolitan values in the ("foreign" and "hostile") populations, whose major concerns manifestly belong to another order. The concurrent state establishment of the market economy and democratic ideals by means of military force should make nation-building possible and to pacify the "civil society" by ensuring at the same time economic development and growth. Knowing, however, that the Star-Spangled Banner will wave only so long as it is necessary to introduce a free market and the reign of liberty. The hyperpower thus allows itself but a parenthetical empire . But, how to be a "minimum empire" when one maintains seven hundred and fifty military bases in one hundred and thirty countries, besides numerous programmes of "secret intervention", "silent operation" and "police protection", as well as plans for "virtual bases" that encircle the globe ? The only possibility is to temporarily and flexibly implement it, or to enunciate it through disavowal manoeuvres: an empire denied or a denial of empire. Thus the United States sells the notion of empire by offering a cut-price colonization: the responsible Americans now only plan interventions that are as brief as possible , in other words, a "McOccupation". However, this furtive and hardly reliable concept of imperial authority will always be perceived as an invasion and a predation by the "occupied", apart from the fact that such a volatile colonization proves to be full of danger for the "occupiers" as well as the "occupied". The idea of a "lite" empire also finds its bearings in the representation according to which such a regime would remove all contradictions, would abolish the distinctions between "outer" and "inner", would efface the borders between "outside" and "inside". "There is no longer an outside", write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their view, "The modern dialectic of internal and external has been replaced by an interplay of degrees ans intensities, hybridities and artifice". Similarly, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman contends that 9/11 September has made it clear that there is no outside". Hence, the negative corollary posed by a number of observers: with European unification and the emergence of the new world "governance", guided by the enlightened ideas of opening outwards and interdependence, the mutual vulnerability of all countries is growing, also on American territory Thus, we would have entered into international relations of the "postmodern" type. But, who does not perceive that 9/11 "a deferred effect of the 'Cold War', the genealogy of which can be traced back to the support of the mujahiddin by the United States against the intervention of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan" (Derrida, in Borradori 2003: 92)? And who could contest that this event experienced as a cataclysm, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, apart from the interminable conflict in Palestine, has raised the veil of antagonism between the "colonizer" and the "colonized", radicalized the political positions of each of the entrenched camps and, finally, has deepened the Manichean geography between "us" and "them"?

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 4Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism Kritik---1NC Impact – the New Orientalism necessitates war and genocide against the supposedly irrational Oriental other. Accepting this ideology sparks a new wave of Crusades – the only way to deal with a completely excluded Other is to seek its elimination. Once we have designated a group of people is inherently different – the road to their genocide is short indeed.PINAR BATUR ‘7• Vassar College (Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, “Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide”)

Albert Memmi argued that “We have no idea what the colonized would have been without colonization, but we certainly see what happened as a result of it”(Memmi, 1965: 114). Events surrounding Iraq and Katrina provide three critical points regarding global racism. The first one is that segregation, exclusion, and genocide are closely related and facilitated by institutions employing the white racial frame to legitimize their ideologies and actions. The second one is the continuation of violence, either sporadically or systematically, with single- minded determination from segregation, to exclusion, to genocide. The third point is that legitimization and justification of violence is embedded in the resignation that global racism will not alter its course, and there is no way to challenge global racism. Together these three points facilitate the base for war and genocide In 1993, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel P. Huntington racialized the future of global conflict by declaring that “the clash of civilizations will domi- nate global politics”(Huntington 1993: 22). He declared that the fault line will be drawn by crisis and bloodshed. Huntington’s end of ideology meant the West is now expected to confront the Confucian-Islamic “other.” Huntington intoned “Islam has bloody borders,” and he expected the West to develop cooperation among Christian brethren, while limiting the military strength of the “Confucian-Islamic” civilizations, by exploiting the conflicts within them. When the walls of communism fell, a new enemy was found in Islam, and loathing and fear of Islam exploded with September 11. The new color line means “we hate them not because of what they do, but because of who they are and what they believe in.” The vehement denial of racism, and the fervent assertion of democratic equality in the West, are matched by detestation and anger toward Muslims, who are not European, not Western, and therefore not civilized. Since the context of “different” and “inferior” has become not just a function of race or gender, but of culture and ideology, it has become another instrument of belief and the self- righteous racism of American expansionism and “new imperialism.” The assumed superiority of the West has become the new “White Man’s Burden,” to expand and to recreate the world in an American image. The rationalization of this expansion, albeit to “protect our freedoms and our way of life” or “to combat terrorism,” is fueled by racist ideology, obscured in the darkness behind the façade of inalienable rights of the West to defend civilization against enemies in global culture wars. At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, stretch- ing from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in American foreign policy exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999). Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race.” It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades , but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West , one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said,“show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said,“I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims”(Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoic- ing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at

CONTINUED - NO TEXT REMOVED...

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 5Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism Kritik---1NCCONTINUED - NO TEXT REMOVED...

Princeton,“this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world”(Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement”(Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each... will have to learn to coexist with the others”(Huntington 1993: 49). Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his position. Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed,“This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (TurkishPress. com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is the ide- ological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the 20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase “contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim com- munity”(Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this new rhetoric equates ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said,“... we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in”(CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racial- ized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 6Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism Kritik---1NC Our alternative is to reject the 1AC and its Orientalist ideas – you must use the ballot to take an oppositional stance against Orientalism. This is a necessary step towards anything resembling solvency – whether it is of the Alternative or of the PlanEdward Said ‘3 New ‘Preface’ to Orientalism. Penguin Books Edition (2003) p. xvii

My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange. I have called what I try to do "humanism," a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. More-over, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, there-fore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. This is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. The disheartening part is that the more the critical study of culture shows us that this is the case, the less influence such a view seems to have, and the more territorially reductive polarizations like "Islam v. the West" seem to conquer. For those of us who by force of circumstance actually live the pluri-cultural life as it entails Islam and the West, I have long felt that a special intellectual and moral responsibility attaches to what we do as scholars and intellectuals. Certainly I think it is incumbent upon us to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experience and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation and collective passion. This is not to say that we cannot speak about issues of injustice and suffering, but that we need to do so always within a context that is amply situated in history, culture and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/ Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modem anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 7Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal Withdrawal doesn’t actually remove US presence – it paves the way for a new type of automated warfare, conducted by machines, without adequate oversight. The affirmative isn’t restricting Orientalism – they are giving it a new form by justifying the rapid growth of a so-called ‘presence-less war’Graham ‘6, Is a Professor at the University of Durham, 2006 [June, Stephen, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118603050/PDFSTART, Download Date: July 14, 2010]

In ‘homeland’ cities, to be sure, there is a radical ratcheting-up of surveillance and (attempted) social control, the endless ‘terror talk’, highly problematic clampdowns, the ‘hardening’ of urban ‘targets’, and potentially indefinite incarcerations, sometimes within extra-legal or extra-territorial camps, for those people deemed to display the signifiers of real or ‘dormant’ terrorists. In the ‘targeted’ urban spaces of worlds within Barnett’s ‘non-integrating gap’, meanwhile, weapons systems are currently being designed which are emerging as systems of automated, continuous (attempted) assassination. Here, chillingly, software code is being invested with the sovereign power to kill. Such systems are being brought into being within legal and geographical states of exception that are now increasingly being normalized and universalized as global strategy. This trend is backed by neoconservative ideologies and geopolitical scripts. These justify continuous, pre-emptive US military aggression against sources of ‘terrorism’ as a central platform of Dick Cheney’s ‘New Normalcy’, or the Pentagon’s ‘long war’. Such a strategy is also being fuelled by the great temptation, in the light of the horrors of street fighting during the Iraq insurgency, and the 2000+ US military dead, for the US state and military to deploy autonomous and robotized US weapons against purported enemies who are always likely to remain all-too human (Graham, 2006b). ‘The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines?’ wondered Gordon Johnson, head of a US army robot weapons team, in 2003. ‘I’m guessing not’ (cited in Lawlor, 2004: 3). The main worry here is that these systems will be deployed stealthily by the US state to ‘loiter’ more or less permanently above and within cities and regions deemed to be the ‘war on terror’s’ main targets. They might then produce realms of automated, stealthy and continuous violence. Let loose from both the spatial and temporal limits, and the legal norms, of war, as traditionally understood (i.e. in its declared and demarcated state-vs-state guises), this violence is likely to largely escape the selective and capricious gaze of mainstream Western media (see Blackmore, 2005). This shift to robotized war, and militaristic paradigms which see cities as mere battlespace, and their inhabitants as mere targets, is far from uncontested. Even within the US military — especially the infantry in the US Army — many are deeply sceptical of any military ‘silver bullets’ emerging from the think tanks, research complexes and weapons manufacturers of the US military-industrial-entertainment complex. Nonetheless, the latest 2006 Pentagon Defense Review suggests that the widespread deployment of autonomous, armed drones across large swathes of our urbanizing world is already being planned and undertaken. The links explored here between urban imaginative geographies, high-tech weaponry, and the urbanizing geopolitics of insurgency against the transnational colonial and military power of the US empire, thus look set to deepen further.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 8Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal Material withdrawal is the new Orientalist way of war – the imaginative geographies that Orientalist rhetoric produced stay intact only to be destroyed and colonized by the new automated warfare of the US military.Graham ‘6, Is a Professor at the University of Durham, 2006 [June, Stephen, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118603050/PDFSTART, Download Date: July 14, 2010]

Strikingly, in Huber and Mills’s scenario, political judgements about the (lack of) value of human life in the demonized cities and spaces that have been so powerfully (re)constructed in ‘war on terror’ discourses, is actually maintained and policed through automated surveillance and killing systems. For here the apparent disposability of life in such ‘target’ cities is maintained continuously by the ongoing presence of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (or UCAVs) armed with ‘Hellfire’ missiles. These weapons can be launched at short notice, sometimes from operators sited at transoceanic distances, once the surveillance webs that saturate the ‘target cities’ detect some notional ‘target’. Far from being some fanciful military futurology from Huber and Mills’ technophiliac fantasies, then, these principles are actually directly shaping the design of new US military systems which are already under development or even deployment as part of the new Pentagon strategy of ‘long war’ in which the number of unmanned and armed drones is to be more than doubled by 2010 (US Department of Defense, 2006). Thus, on the one hand, as already mentioned, the cities and urban corridors within US national borders are being wired up with a large range of automated sensors which are designed to detect and locate a whole spectrum of potentially ‘terrorist’ threats. On the other, the Pentagon’s research and development outfit, DARPA (the Defense Applications Research and Projects Agency), is now developing the sorts of large-scale, ‘loitering’ surveillance grids to try and ‘unveil’ the supposedly impenetrable and labyrinthine landscapes of closely built Middle Eastern cities. In a new programme tellingly titled Combat Zones That See (or CTS), DARPA (2003) is developing systems of micro-cameras and sensors that can be scattered discretely across built urban landscapes and that automatically scan millions of vehicles and human faces for ‘known targets’ and record any event deemed to be ‘unusual’. ‘The ability to track vehicles across extended distances is the key to providing actionable intelligence for military operations in urban terrain’, the brief for the programme argues. ‘Combat Zones that See will advance the state of the art for multiple-camera video tracking to the point where expected tracking length reaches city-sized distances’ (DARPA, 2003). Befitting the definition of Middle Eastern ‘target’ cities within US military doctrine as zones where human life warrants little protection or ornamentation, ‘actionable’ here is most likely to be translated in practice — Israeli style — as automated or near- automated aerial attempts at killing the ‘targeted’ person(s). Because urban density in target cities is seen to render ‘stand-off sensing from airborne and space-borne platforms ineffective’ (ibid.), CTS’ main role will be to hold even targets within densely urbanized spaces continuously ‘at risk’ from near-instant targeting and destruction from weapons guided by the Global Positioning System. In US military jargon this is termed ‘compressing the kill chain’ — a process which ‘closes the time delay between sensor and shooter’ to an extent that brings ‘persistent area dominance’ (or PAD) even over and within dense megacities like Baghdad (Hebert, 2003: 36). Since 2002, for the first time, fleets of apparently identical US unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have indeed patrolled both the increasingly militarized border of the Southern United States and the cities and frontier lands of the war zones of the Middle East. Identical, that is, except in one crucial respect. Tellingly, in the former case, however, worries have been expressed about the dangers of accidental crashes from unarmed drones flying over the US’s civilian population by Federal aviation safety officers. ‘How UAVs could be integrated into civilian airspace within the United States is a fundamental question that would need to be addressed by the Federal Aviation Administration’, reported a committee to Congress on the issue in 2005 (Bolkcom, 2005: 12). ‘Integrating UAVs into civilian airspace so that they could operate safely would require not only the creation of regulatory guidelines by the Federal Aviation Administration but also technical developments’ (ibid.: 12). In the latter case, meanwhile, these unmanned aircraft have been armed for the first time with missiles and have undertaken, by remote control, at least 80 assassination raids targeting alleged ‘terrorists’ (and those who are unlucky enough to be close by) in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. On one occasion, in early January 2006, a CIA-piloted ‘Predator’ drone, ostensibly targeting Ayman al Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan, killed 22 innocent civilians and sparked mass protests across Pakistan’s cities. As a further demonstration of how the transnational connections underpinning US military technology both reflect, and erupt within, the ‘war on terror’s’ urban imaginative geographies, some Predator ‘pilots’ actually operate from virtual reality ‘caves’ in a Florida air base 8–10,000 miles away from the drones’ target zones. For the US military personnel doing the piloting, this ‘virtual’ work is almost indistinguishable from a ‘shoot-’em-up’ video game (except that the people who die are real). ‘At the end of the work day’, one Predator operator reflected in 2003, ‘you walk back into the rest of life in America’ (quoted in Newman, 2003). The ‘success’ of these aerial and long-distance assassinations has fuelled much broader investments in the development of aerial vehicles and munitions that will combine with CTS-type systems to provide the military holy grail of what US military strategists now term ‘persistent area dominance’. Large-scale efforts are already underway to develop such a capability. These specifically address urban ‘target’ areas through what is being termed, in the jargon, a ‘Total Urban Dominance Layered System’ (or TUDLS) (Plenge, 2004). This programme, which builds on CTS, is designed to deliver what the weapons designers call ‘a family of integrated and complementary vehicles layered over an urban area to provide persistent dominance’ (ibid.). In the euphemistic geek-speak of the US military, TUDLS will encompass ‘long hover and loiter propulsions systems, multi-discriminant sensors and seekers, mini- and micro-air vehicles, mini-lethal and non-lethal warheads, autonomous and man-in-the-loop control algorithms, and a strong interface with the battlespace information network’ (ibid.). For those unused to the euphemisms here it must be stressed that ‘autonomous control algorithms’ actually means that the developers of these systems envisage that the flying vehicles, and the computer systems that control them, will, eventually, be designed to take the decisions to kill purported ‘targets’ without any human intervention whatsoever. Entirely robotic attack aircraft or ‘dominators’ are already under development by the US Air Force (Tirpak, 2001). As the blurb from one manufacturer puts it, ‘these dominators will be capable of completing the entire kill chain with minimal human involvement’ (Plenge, 2004).

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 9Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal Orientalist mindsets are what pave the way for this new way of war – US soldiers trained in Orientalist traditions will use the plan’s withdrawal of the military troops as a justification for the furthering of automated warfare, relegating entirely new populations to the status of irrelevant – and therefore able to be killed at willGraham ‘6, Department of Geography at Durham University, 2006 [Stephen, “Interrupting the Algorithmic Gaze? Urban Warfare and US Military Technology” Chapter for MacDonald, F. at al (Ed.) Geopolitics and Visual Culture: Representation, Performance, Observant Practice (Tauris)(Forthcoming),

This chapter suggests that it is important to incorporate the sentient and ‘visual’ capabilities of machines and cyborganised systems into discussions about the intersections of geopolitics and visual culture. In particular, it is clear that a major focus within Western military research and development currently is to try and render the complex three-dimensional geographies of global south cities transparent to the machinic and algorithmic gaze of contemporary military technologies. In the light of the political fallout from the disaster of Iraq, the ‘urban turn’ in the RMA has particular momentum currently. Its constituent programmes are a result of a major ‘supply push’ by an increasingly integrated complex of surveillance, corrections and military corporations, who are trying to exploit the disastrous experience of US forces in Iraq’s cities since 2003. In such a context, it is easy to sell technological silver bullets, offering dreams of omniscience and, crucially, the promise of removing the bodies of US personnel far from the dangers of the urban streets they are attempting to occupy. Scenarios in which sentient robot warriors autonomously dispatch any adversary emerging from the urban labyrinth add to the political attraction of perhaps the ultimate in ‘asymmetric’ war. Here, the proverbial insurgent, necessarily relying on their corporeal presence and locality, sacrificing themselves against in futile exchanges with autonomous robot drones tied intimately into distanciated webs of command and control. Such dreams of developing autonomous surveillance, targeting and killing machines tailored to overcome the interruptive effects of urban geographies, raise three further points for discussion. First, the promise of delegating the military gaze to autonomous machines, animated by computer algorithms, is a response to more than just military discourses which emphasise the purported interruptive effects of global south cities on networked military hardware . It also connects very powerfully with broader trances of Western visual culture, deeply tied to Orientalist traditions. In these, Arab cities, in particular, are invariably rendered as intrinsically devious and labyrinthine structures opaque to the penetrative gaze of Western visual and military technology: places where, in Derek Gregory’s words (2004, 202-207)., “deceipt and danger threaten[…] at every turn.” Take, for example, an extremely popular range of urban warfare video games, which are produced by the US military for commercial and popular use using the electronic simulations they use to train US military personnel for urban combat as a basis. Such games rely completely on stylised and Orientalised depictions of Arab urban areas. A universal feature of both urban RMA discourses, and popular cultural renditions of Arab cities in video games and the like, is the reduction of global south cities to physical, uninhabited spaces whose very geographies are essentialised as a geopolitical risk to the verticalised power of the US military. Such discourses directly lead to the dehumanisation of the citizens of these cities within the hyper-militarised rhetoric which dominates the US military, a process which, in turn, renders their lives, deaths, and citizenship of no account. For, in trying to render Orientalised cityscapes transparent to the both algorithmic gaze of Western military technoscience, and the immersed, voyeuristic gaze of the video game player, the inhabitants and social worlds of Arab and global south cities simultaneously become invisible. ‘Cities’ are reduced to pure ‘battlespace’. Urban inhabitants become ‘targets’ to be tracked, surveilled and, if necessary, targeted with weapons. And notions of the civilian are increasingly rendered meaningless within wider discussions about how 'assymetric’, ‘network-centric’ or ‘unrestricted’ warfare means that all bodies, everywhere, must be treated, a priori, as adversaries (Gregory, 2006).

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 10Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Withdrawal---Afghanistan Afghan Withdrawal Increasing Military Drone WarfareJaved, 2010[ March 5, Bassam, “The US withdrawal and its implications” The News, http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=227290, Download Date: July 21, 2010]

The exasperated American surge-and-exit strategy reflects the increased frustration of the Western alliance, which has failed to bring about stability to Afghanistan. The exit part of any military strategy surly materialises successfully however, the stability part post withdrawal or exit of the affected country always remained dicey. Similarly, in case of Afghanistan, the case would not be any different as the exit would not yield any long term stability. To add to the frustration, the Dutch government’s debacle over the issue of withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan, indicates the mood of the Western public over the issue. Also, the fact that no other country has come forward to-date to replace the Dutch forces in Afghanistan makes it evident that the withdrawal will be there soon. The withdrawal though, may portray America as weak but it has no choice since prolonging the stay any more would still tantamount to weakness any way. The withdrawal of foreign forces may not be wholesome but in parts over five to six years. Still, one might see the presence of a few thousand of them at the end, typically on the lines of Iraqi withdrawal. However, in the time leading up to the phased withdrawal, there are more fervent public voices calling for immediate withdrawal of their respective forces from Afghanistan. Amongst the rising tide of like minded people in favour of withdrawal, there are some lonely voices too that are heard on and off calling for continuation of deployment of Western forces in Afghanistan. This segment of the society is skeptical of post withdrawal scenario in Afghanistan. The apprehensions on the withdrawal are many. The most important geopolitical repercussion of the withdrawal being cited would be the perception that America stands defeated in the long drawn Afghan war. The others include the perception that the withdrawal will lead to the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban allowing al-Qaeda renewed access to the country, and al-Qaeda making use of Afghanistan to successfully attack the West again. The withdrawal will have its implications on Pakistan too and as such, it must prepare itself to confront all challenges emerging out of the event and exert its weight in stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan. This will be all the more difficult as other countries like India and Iran will also be vying to get some stakes in Afghanistan upon withdrawal of foreign forces from there. Some of the scenarios that might develop out of the situation then would be discussed hereafter in this article. The Northern Alliance would continue to be supported by Russia, India and Iran in the post withdrawal Afghanistan. The Pashtuns, who ruled Afghanistan for over 200 years, having been denied their due right in the Afghan polity under the US occupation, would resist the dominance of the Northern Alliance with the tacit support of its war time friends for Kabul that may result in further bloodshed. Pakistan may again face the burden of the refugees and a destabilized Afghanistan yet again, which would be detrimental to its overall security. Since there exists a lot of disparity within the Afghan society, the Afghan strife will continue that may lead to formation of fresh alliances between various Afghan factions to develop some equilibrium, which resultantly could prolong instability in Afghanistan. The interim period would be exploited by India to cement its foothold in Afghan affairs much to the detriment of Pakistan’s interests. The withdrawal may also encourage fundamentalists and extremists the world over, who may be inspired by the resilience of Afghans and their success in forcing foreign military powers out of their lands and as such adopt as means of achieving victories. The perceptions amongst the Afghan Taliban that Pakistan has been siding with the Western forces against them may lead to their disenchantment with Pakistan and they may be inclined to work against its interests. Pakistan does not enjoy very good relations with the Northern Alliance. As such, it will be difficult for it to negotiate an ultimate power sharing deal between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, if it may try to at some point of time. The United States, on the lines of Iraqi withdrawal, may leave some air elements behind in Afghanistan, including fighter jets and drones and continue using them against the Taliban to signal to the world that it has not abandoned Afghanistan. This situation will not provide any reprieve from the current situation that it confronts today. Finally, to conclude, the United States and Pakistan now share a common vision for a stable Afghanistan. The stakes for both of them are very high. The United States understands the security concerns of Pakistan that emanate from across the border in Afghanistan, especially when India is in play there. It is no other country than Pakistan that can help Afghanistan, based on its centuries-old relationship and personal affiliations with Afghans in capacity building and Afghanistan’s state institutions. Pakistan has the necessary expertise to undertake the development tasks. This arrangement will be acceptable to the common Afghan as well. Undoubtedly, Pakistan will be able to carry on these development tasks even after the departure of Americans. To ensure the Afghans that it will not turn its back this time, the United States must commit itself financially towards the development of infrastructure therein Afghanistan.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 11Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Afghanistan---Warlords

The idea that Afghan warlords are distinct people is a thoroughly racist and Orientalist idea.

Stanski. 08. Doctoral Student at Nuffield College.(keith stanski. “So These Folks are Aggressive': An Orientalist Reading of `Afghan Warlords” JCI.  23 May 2008. http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/40/1/73.full.pdf+html)

Afghan regime with a more sympathetic one.6 This historical comparison stands to put into perspective how such a conflicted vision of ‘Afghan warlords’ has developed during the United States’ most recent intervention in Afghanistan. The article draws this comparison by developing a discursive analysis of primary and secondary materials from the First Anglo-Afghan War and Operation Enduring Freedom. As exemplified in the later work of Michel Foucault (1977, 1978, 2004), discursive analysis can reveal not only how actors construct identities, concepts and labels in specific historical and social contexts, but also how these discursive patterns are essential to the way society is organized and functions. For example, particular discourses render appropriate certain policies or authorize specific individuals, and all the while marginalize others. It is the attention to what Jennifer Milliken (1999: 229) calls ‘discourse productivity’ that makes this type of discursive analysis most valuable to the study of politics. In the case of the present study, a careful reading of sources from each intervention stands to provide a fuller understanding of how longstanding assumptions about the ‘Afghan people’ continue to influence how the United States responds to ‘Afghan warlords’. Particular attention is devoted to how Orientalist archetypes – that is, ontological and epistemological distinctions between the ‘Occident’ and the ‘Orient’ – have long informed how each Western power understands ‘Afghans’ and their expressions of force. As demonstrated below, theories of Orientalism provide a framework through which to interrogate longstanding cultural constructions about Afghanistan, the West and the purported differences between the two.7 This theoretical approach challenges observers to account for assumptions that underpin seemingly commonplace conclusions that Afghans are somehow starkly different from and utterly inferior to Westerners. Perhaps more importantly, the Orientalist framework also opens a larger discussion about how cultural constructions, in their various forms and contexts, have been an essential part of attempts by Britain and the United States to develop, maintain and enhance their authority in Afghanistan, particularly during times of war. It is argued here that ‘Afghan warlords’ are more than just evidence of Afghanistan’s recent turmoil. Those labelled ‘warlords’ are heirs to a longstanding tendency in US and British political thought to construct a violent Afghan ‘Other’, a figure that contrasts with, yet also affirms, purportedly essential features of the West. This pattern of thought depends largely, but not exclusively, on a series of Orientalist archetypes about the decidedly violent and treacherous nature of the ‘Afghan people’ and the superiority of Keith Stanski An Orientalist Reading of ‘Afghan Warlords’ 75 6 See Bush (2001); McNaughten ([1838 ]1842: 237–247). 7 There is a range of interpretations of Orientalism, each stressing different features of the tradition. This article draws primarily on the work of Edward Said and other scholars that examine Orientalism in British and US political discourse. See Klein (2003); McAlister (2001); Lowe (1993); Said (1978, 1993).

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 12Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Iraq

The US war in Iraq was started because of and is still waged according to Orientalist assumptions – the plan does not break free of them.

Trivundza 04. doctoral student at the Faculty of Social Sciences(Ilija Tomanic Trivundza. “Orientalism as news. Pictorial representations of the US attack on Iraq in Delo” Sage publication. 2004. http://jou.sagepub.com/content/5/4/480.full.pdf ) 

The orientalization of Iraq had already been firmly established during the Gulf War (1991). ‘Orientalist metaphors conceptualised the enemy, Iraq, in terms of traditionally rich associations with the Orient, and Islam as an integral part of it, in order to justify the war as a way to protect Western civilization and its way of life’ (Sandikcioglu, 1999: 27; emphasis in the original). The image of Saddam Hussein as the incarnation of an evil, dangerous madman and the new Hitler, established by the western media in 1991 (e.g. Shohat and Stam, 1994; Kellner, 1995; Philo and McLaughlin, 1995; Shaw, 1996; Sandikcioglu, 1999) has never completely left the vocabulary of the US administration and has frequently been evoked in the media since the end of the Gulf War. But by the end of 2002, the ideological venture against Iraq could not simply continue to build upon abundant pre-existing Orientalist imagery. The US administration had to introduce the idea of liberating the oppressed people of Iraq to gain a stronger moral justification for the invasion. But this motive of ‘liberating the oppressed’ indicated that the Other was not homogeneous and that only a small (but very dangerous) part of it was evil. By failing to secure a clear Orientalist frame, the justification for military intervention was presented in terms of the eternal struggle between good and evil and its underlying principle of ‘melodramatic imagination’ (Brooks, 1995). Within this metaphorical vision, the evil was personalized against the pale backdrop of Orientalism, 8 substantiated by abundant visual imagery of Hussein’s selfimposed cult of personality.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 13Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Korea The US has a dominating mindset toward South Korea – the plan is fused with the idea that the US must come in to save the crazy Koreans

Eunwoo ‘8, is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Gender Research, Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Seoul National University, 2008 [Joo, October 6, “Under the Gaze of the American Other” www.ekoreajournal.net/upload/html/HTML4419.html, Download Date: July 31, 2010]

Dialectics between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal and between imaginary identification and symbolic identification are deployed under the domination of the former by the latter. Therefore, the identity formation of the subject or identification is always carried out under the gaze of the Other.[3] Being subject to the gaze of the Other means that an individual or group takes the point of view of the Other and then internalizes the way the Other looks at that individual or group. Thus, the way Korea looks at the U.S. as a model country and the way the U.S. in reality looks at Korea are not symmetrical by any means. Moreover, a gaze is not an ideal image, but only a small fragment of the Real, or a real void in the Symbolic, in the Lacanian sense. Gaze does not respond to one's desire, and if confronted, threatens one's survival as a subject, because one is degraded and reduced to the object of the gaze. Said's discussion of Orientalism has many implications in this regard. According to Said, Orientalism, the Western European view of and discourse on the East, refers to the way European Christianity, for the purpose of setting up its own identity, created the East as the other, imposed a rule upon the East, and took the control of the East. It is a long-established system of accumulating and reproducing knowledge. In this system, the East cannot exist, nor can it speak for itself; it only speaks from the perspective of the West. The U.S. has adopted this viewpoint with regard to Islam and the rest of Asia. With its imperial hegemony in the twentieth century, the U.S. has created a similar kind of discipline in the name of regional studies, while the United Kingdom and France did through bibliographical study during the nineteenth century.[4] This approach was vital to the U.S. because without a feudal history and tradition it had to "confirm its identity by regarding the external world and its enemies as the other and negating it."[5] This tradition has been stronger perhaps in the U.S. than in any other country. The gaze of the Other that observes, examines, and imposes disciplines on its others is cruel. It classifies and controls its objects of observation and forces them to internalize its perspective. The subject, in relation to the Other, is the product of this process (subjectification as subordination). Fanon, who has greatly influenced Said, argues that Africans are stripped of their individuality and fixed as a "fossilized" race of the Black under the gaze of white people, which is "the only existing eyes looking at them in reality."[6] How different are Koreans from Africans in their relationship to the U.S.? And what is nature of the national modernization for the sake of which Koreans have exerted such in the last thirty to forty years? Modernization theory takes the U.S. as its model and believes that modernization, industrialization, and Westernization are one and the same. It regards the ambiguous concept of tradition as an obstacle to development and something that must be overcome. So, modernization theory is nothing more than the will to power and truth that demands a thorough self-denial.[7] Korea has always hoped and believed that the U.S. would look upon it with a favorable eye, but regretfully, this has not always been the case. The United States has only looked upon Korea as a less developed country of a yellow race in Asia, at best as a docile client to buy U.S. products and weapons, and even so, the gaze was not friendly. Contrary to Korean hopes, the negative gaze of the Other produces curious stereotypes that merge with the Orientalist prism of the West. For example, Koreans are portrayed in Hollywood movies as dependent, childlike docile people, who need to be protected and educated by whites (note the film M*A*S*H (1970) about a U.S. mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War and the television comedy series based upon it.), or as heartless money-mongering economic animals, and petty shopkeepers. These negative stereotypes persisted in the 1990s film Falling Down (1993), in which Korean and various Third World characters are portrayed as enemies threatening the status of white middle-class fathers. III The gaze of the American Other and the eyes of the admiring Korean can never meet because, Lacan says, the Other does not exist. The consistent, smoothly integrated symbolic order does not exist. No organic, completely harmonious or agreeable relations can exist between Korea and the United States. On the same count, the U.S., as an ideal image and model also does not exist in reality. In the two countries' intersubjective relations, America as the subject supposed to know the secret of Korean desires also does not exist. Therefore, it is merely wishful thinking to hope that the U.S. will consider Korea's situation if Korea makes a concession to the U.S. first. This is similar to Lacan's proposition that "There is no such a thing as sexual relationship." As long as the subjects with desire are at a face-off, communication is impossible. And yet Korea's unrequited love affair with the U.S. continues. Just a few days after anti-U.S. "candlelight demonstration" were held to commemorate two middle school girls killed by a U.S. armored vehicle in Uijeongbu (where a U.S. military base is located), another mass rally of a similar scale was held on the same spot shouting "We love America." Korea's blind love of and trust in America has been led by the dominating class and elite for the last several decades. This community has learned by experience that affinity with America helped them succeed in life and earn power and money since America's occupation of the peninsula in 1945. They studied in America, and internalized the American worldview. Thus, they have gained benefits from maintaining a favorable relationship with the U.S. and enjoyed the ensuing comfort. Because they are smart, they retort, "Do you think we are so naive? We know very well that international relations work based on specific interests, not on unconditional friendship." But as 탐 i탑 ek points out, that kind of cynicism is a very effective form of ideology that supports symbolic order: "I know very well . . . but still . . ." Moreover, ideology is already at work in the very reference to the relationship with interests, whether it be a national interest, private, or collective. This is the case because ideology is a matter of behavior before it is a matter of knowledge. This is a Pascalian problem: "If you do not believe, kneel down, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself." It is the same as the fact that people are aware bank notes are merely valueless paper, yet they still, even more effectively mediate exchanges of goods and services. [8] The leaders of Korean society, although they themselves are illegitimate sons of the American father, send their pregnant wives and daughters-in-law across the Pacific to deliver their babies in American hospitals to give their offspring the status of America's legitimate sons. Sensing such overt secrets of the elite early on, the shrewd middle class, motivated by fear of downward mobility and desire for status upgrade, send their children abroad to study or provide them expensive English lessons in Korea, stretching their means to catch up with the upper class. In a sense, those who sincerely believe in the ideal image of America or fear to discard this image are in fact ordinary Koreans who were taught to regard America as the savior who sacrificed its soldiers and saved Korea from hunger and poverty. But things have since changed, most significantly, since the violent suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. Also, one must consider the U.S. involvement in the IMF bailout and doubt regarding the role of the U.S. in the financial crisis which brought about bailout (and U.S. pressure on Korea to open up its market), as well as the killing of two middle-school girls in Uijeongbu. In addition, the U.S. reaction to the North Korean nuclear crisis took the Korean peninsula to the

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 14Sophs Orientalism K

brink of war in 1996 and triggered a crisis of imminent war once again in the summer of 2003. Even today, the future is unclear. And then there was the so-called Hollywood action by short-track speedskater Anton Ohno at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, notorious for the U.S. team's unfair home ground advantage. The official history of the Korean peninsula has been written in a fashion to hide the traumatic facts that the Republic of Korea was established with the sacrifice of many Korean lives, that much of the sacrifice was caused by a U.S. scheme to dominate the world order, and that the U.S. directly led or intervened in the process. Or, this history sublimates those traumatic facts as much as possible so as to make them comprehensible within a network of symbolic signification. Particularly, the killings of Korean civilians led by U.S. forces after liberation (e.g., the April 3 Uprising) were expelled to the realm of the Real, which is not captured by the network of signification of "History," since they threaten the appearance of liberal democracy. Thus the consistent symbolic appearance of the Republic of Korea has been constructed at the diachronic level. In a synchronic structural arrangement, the traumatic fact had to be covered up that the power of the U.S.--as epitomized by the U.S. forces still stationed in Korea's territory--has played the role of the real core posing a threat to the appearance of Korea as an independent nation, and at the same time contributing to repression of inner antagonism in Korean society and helping Korea maintain its appearance of a nation system.[9] However, the massacre in Gwangju and the ambiguous role of the U.S. in it disclosed these traumatic truths. Because of these experiences, the way Koreans view the U.S. has changed fundamentally, as has the image of the U.S. While the U.S. may still be the Other, it now appears more like the other side of the Other, or as the figure of the obscene superego. It is no longer the imaginary loving father, the object of identification, but the father who enjoys jouissance, the obscene father or the real father who wields traumatic violence and monopolizes women, like the Zeus's father, the titan Cronus, who devoured his sons. Lacan's theory presents three types of father or father figures. The symbolic father is a symbolic instance who is defined by his place in the network of symbolic signification and governs intersubjective relations. He is the law, the father as name, noun, or the name of the father, i.e., the signifier. The imaginary father is the object of identification, the ideal image, i.e., father as the Imago. In contrast, the real father is estranged from the ideal image and cannot be subsumed into the web of symbolic signification, so this father becomes a traumatic experience. The real father or father figure cannot be the object of identification, unlike the ideal father; he may take the appearance of a weak, incapable, impotent father or an obscene, violent father. The real father is the other side of the symbolic father as the other side of the Other is the obscene superego and the other side of law is violence.[10] Roughly speaking, America as the symbolic father is defined by its status in the world system as the military and economic hegemonic nation in the world order of the twentieth century. Based on this, the U.S. exercises certain structural control over Korea from which Korea cannot easily escape. Meanwhile, America as the imaginary father appears as the image of an ideal model nation and Korea's savior, benefactor, protector and as a bastion of liberal democracy. America as the real father demands that its national interest become the absolute order. It is totally indifferent to the legitimate demands Korea or other weak nations make based on universal human values or international law, and exercise or threaten either bloody or bloodless violence for its goals. All of these facts shatter the illusion of benevolent paternalism. In other words, America as the real father is the nation that is directly and indirectly involved in the killings of civilians on Jejudo island and in Gwangju, but is hidden behind the scenes, and is the homeland of soldiers who brutally murdered Korean prostitutes in brothels serving U.S. soldiers.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 15Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Japan The US views Japan through an Orientalist lense – the plan still sees America as Japan’s saving grace.

Rosen ‘9, Faculty of Intercultural Communication Hiroshima Women's University, 2009 [Steven L, February 23, “Japan as Other: Orientalism and Cultural Conflict”, www.immi.se/intercultural/nr4/cultural%20conflict.htm, Download Date, July 31, 2010]

Abstract This paper tries to show how cross-cultural conflict often occurs between Japan and Westerners as the result of imposing one's own cultural meanings onto another culture. Interpretations of Japan, as well as other Asian cultures, often carries an implicit assumption that the West is rational (and superior) whereas the East is bound by ancient traditions (and is inferior). "Orientalism" has been identified as the particular form that Western stereotypical understandings of Asian cultures has taken. Intercultural communication becomes highly problematic as long as stereotypes are held and as long as the other culture is seen as foreign and wholly other. By transcending this "Orientalism" we will be in a better position to understand and communicate with those from another culture without having to set up a dichotomous boundary between "us" and "them." Conflict with Japan is focused on 1) because there seems to be a lot of it, and 2) because Japan represents a unique culture field which is, in some ways, both modern and familiar, yet in other ways seemingly foreign to Western interpretive structures. This paper will call into question some of the stereotypes that Westerners often project onto Japan as being a monolithic culture which is excessively authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal. We will try to offer some other interpretive options for understanding a culture which has suffered from intercultural communication problems for so long. Orientalism is a total mis-seeing of the other through a veil of interpretations of reality which are relatively impenetrable and resistant to change. It is a form of ethnocentrism which has evolved into cultural myth, invariant in its imaginings, and imperialistic in its aims. This paper argues that so-called Orientalism is a way of life, and not just an out-dated way of knowing from the colonial past; it is an integral part of modern consciousness. Ethnocentrism is the imposition of one's own culturally mediated system of understandings onto others. It is the interpretation and evaluation of others through this epistemological screen, with the implicit assumption that one's own mode of understanding is superior because it is invariantly true. (Erchak 1992:90) In psychological terms we can say that ethnocentrism is a kind of cognitive orientation which understands the world in terms of rigid schemata; Orientalism is a particular historical manifestation of this ethnocentric orientation. It is based on a Western consciousness which "includes a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections." ( Said 1993:90) Orientalism as cultural myth had been articulated through metaphors which characterize the East in ways which emphasize its strangeness and otherness. The Orient (whatever that term may signify) is seen as separate, passive, eccentric, backwards, "with a tendency to despotism." (Said 1993:36) What Edward Said says of stereotypes of Middle-Eastern peoples applies to East Asian stereotypes as well: the Oriental person is a single image, a sweeping generalization; an essentialized image which carries with it the taint of inferiority. (51) The cultural myth of Orientalism is, as Said convincingly demonstrates, fueled or reiterated by academic Orientalism. Although in the United States it is now more politically correct to refer to "East Asian studies" when speaking about research related to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the University of London still boasts The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)- perhaps a throwback to colonial days. This is an appellation which lumps just about all the peoples from Turkey to Tokyo under one rubric, which all its connotations of exoticism and foreignness. Below we will be looking at some examples of how academic Orientalism has helped perpetuate certain stereotypes of Japan as Other. A look at how metaphors comparing and evaluating the Chinese compared to the Japanese in America, bears testimony to how mythic paradigms inform understandings of others, such that we create artificial divisions between the people we may be trying to communicate with. In the 20th century at least, Chinese stereotypes have been far kinder than images of Japanese people and culture. Even though the Second World War clearly separated the Chinese and Japanese into friend and enemy respectively, earlier, pre-war stereotypes as well, evaluated Chinese people and culture in a far kinder light. (Johnson 1988:23) American ideological thinking about the East has generally found Chinese culture to be much more accessible than Japanese- the Chinese are seen to be "more like us": frank and direct, individualistic, rational, educated, pragmatic and practical. Even the cuisine is much more accessible/comprehensible to Western palates, it seems, than the Japanese fare such as raw fish and miso soup. Not only is Japan what Geertz has called, "the last other to be discovered," it seems to us to be the most attenuated of civilized cultures (aboriginal hunter-gather cultures being completely beyond the ken of Western commonsense understandings of reality). Japanese social institutions signify Japan to be a culture with a high level of sophistication in Western eyes, yet it also appears as highly feudal and totally anachronistic to the moral imperatives of the modern world; the culture as a whole tends to be quite opaque to us- Japanese cultural mores are exotic, quixotic and even absurd. The paradigmatic example of this is self-immolation, total self-sacrifice- whether it is killing oneself for one's feudal lord or for the company by overwork. Western images and metaphors for Japan are not all negative, of course- a romantic version of Orientalism paints a picture of Japan whose sophisticated culture with its indigenous traditions are in close harmony with nature (a myth popular in Japan, as well, it might be added); tiny bonsai trees, exotic geisha girls in kimono, manicured rock gardens, the unfathomable mysteries of Zen Buddhism, shiatsu and macrobiotic cooking, signify for us a

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 16Sophs Orientalism K

people who are deeply intuitive and aesthetically attuned in a way that we are not. Nevertheless, this romantic Orientalism is less salient than its shadow side- we could say, is overshadowed by its shadow, which sees the Japanese as basically fanatical, deceitful, with a tendency to cruelty in their private lives and totalitarianism in their public practices. The image which predominates here is of the unquestioning company man/woman who sacrifices all their individuality and humanity for the organization- who submerges their entire identity in the group. To give one powerful example of this essentializing process of image formation which is entailed by Orientalism, we quote form a book entitled, When Culture's Collide, by Richard D. Lewis (1982), a kind of manual for those traveling and doing business around the world to help them understand the alien cultures they come in contact with. By no means the worst of its kind, Lewis’ book expresses very well the way we use metaphors to trivialize another culture in a totalistic way, so as to make it easier to capture it in the network of our own understandings. - Japanese children are encouraged to be completely dependent and keep a sense of interdependence throughout their lives. -Everything must be placed in context in Japan. -Japanese are constrained by their thought processes in a language very different from any other. - They do not like meeting newcomers. - They represent their group and can not therefore pronounce on any matters without consultation- cannot initiate an exchange of views. -Westerners are individuals, but the Japanese represent a company which represents Japan - As we all know, Japanese do not like to lose face. - The Japanese go to incredible lengths to be polite. (Lewis 1988:262) This kind of Orientalism carries with it the implication that Asian people are much more conformist than we are, and less respecting of the dignity of individual rights, i.e., inferior. Social and cognitive psychology tells us that stereotyping is a kind of mental schema making designed to help us grasp reality- to make things more understandable and less threatening; these mental schema such as stereotypes provide us with the illusion of understanding by dividing up and categorizing the flux of experience into easily manageable cognitive maps. (Augustinos 1995:33) Orientalism has been the prevalent mode by which this cognitive need to schematize has manifested itself in apprehending Asian peoples. In recent history, Japan bashing has been a reiteration of the ethnocentrism exhibited during the war, carrying with it negative consequences in terms of cross-cultural understanding/communication. America reacted to the economic defeats and recession of the 1980’s with patent hostility towards Japan, which included such things as Congressmen smashing Japanese radios on Capitol Hill, and the murder of an the Chinese man in Detroit, because he was thought to be Japanese. To some degree, we have witnessed the darkest sorts of racism which characterized our appraisals of Japan during the Second World War. The numerous corporate takeovers of Hollywood movie studios and famous real estate has, of course, exacerbated these fearful stereotypes which signify the Japanese has wholly other; they carry the implicit assumption that "they are not like us- they don’t play by the rules of decency; they don’t play fair." (Buruma 1996:256) The film The Rising Sun features the corporate takeover of America by the Japanese. In this movie, the Japanese are portrayed as almost entirely immoral; the Japanese corporation is analogized as being like the Mafia; in fact in the film, the Japanese Mafia (Yakuza) and the corporation are seen to be in contiguous (metonymic) relationship. The clear message to the Americans who saw the film or read the book is primarily this: watch out- the Japanese corporation and organized crime are morally/ideologically and organizationally/structurally one and the same. The Japanese are coming, and by virtue of their deceitful practices which stem from their underworld gangland power structures and arcane feudal social system, they will accomplish their sinister aims; if we are not on our guard, they are likely to completely usurp American economic power and take away our freedoms too (freedom being contiguous with free market capitalism in American cultural ideology). As Masao Miyoshi says in his insightful book, Off Center, popular works such as these tell us much more about the people writing (and reading) such them, than about the people/culture's they purport to be reporting on. (1991:46) They tend to focus on what is right and wrong with a culture. Karol Van Wolferen’s book from this period, The Enigma of Japanese Power is one such example of casting these sorts of rigid value judgments on the culture one purports to be studying, albeit this time in the form of "academic Orientalism." Though the book is based entirely on factual data, the data is organized and interpreted in such a way as to skew Japan in the direction of being portrayed as a fundamentally fascist country. What needs to be pointed out is that from page 1 till the end, the rhetorical strategy behind his marshaling of numerous facts about the workings of Japanese institutions is this: to evoke a clear picture of Japan as one of the most totalitarian societies in the world. This is clearly an imperialistic/Orientalist agenda insofar as it implies that European culture is the repository of enlightened rationalism, and humanism, with its attendant concern for democratic principles and individual human rights. The classic work, which established our academic understanding of Japan, was Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword. (1946) As Clifford Geertz points out, this ethnography from afar starts out trying to expose the workings of Japanese society to make it more accessible, but by the end of the book has succeeded in accentuating its strangeness and has persuaded us that they are a truly odd people. (Geertz 1988:87) She represents Japan as being a totally homogeneous culture immune to democratic principles and thinking. In this imaginative construction of another people's culture, Japan has become, in the words of Geertz, the Impossible Object, "an enormous something, intricate, and madly busy, that , like an Escher drawing, fails to compute- a challenge not just to our power, but to our powers of comprehension." (85) Of course, labeling someone as an Orientalist or ethnocentrist or imperialist can easily become another form of essentializing, resulting in the creation of a divide between us/them; the labeler can feel politically correct, hence superior, remaining all the while unaware of his or her own fixed structures of interpretation/orientation. In psychological terminology, relying on cognitive schema types is the normal mode of (unreflective) perception. (Erchak 1992:56-59) Ethnocentricism is the natural way of being in the world for cultural beings—

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 17Sophs Orientalism K

social scientists included- a state of affairs where action is mediated by fixed structures of interpretation such that the other is completely obscured and dialogue runs the risk of becoming meaningless. What might be the way out of the prison house of cognitive structures which have spawned the historically mediated illness of Orientalism? Can there be a way out of this epistemological nightmare or crisis of understanding? A program of emancipation has been proposed by professor Antonio T. DeNicolas in his translation/interpretation of the Hindu document, the Bhagavad Gita. In his book Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy Through the Bhagavad Gita (1976), he argues that the Gita itself proposes just such a plan for emancipation from an ethnocentric orientation wherein particular epistemological structures which condition our interpretations of other peoples/cultures have come to be embodied - "… a crisis wherein the present is fed by the habits of the past- a theoretical past substituting for the actual present." (1976:252) To escape from the seemingly no-exit situation of imperialist interpretations of Asian or other foreign people- of Japan bashing- the Gita proposes a radical program of sacrifice of one's perspectives- a seeing through of those structures which, by their very nature, tend to resist being seen through. Through this radical sacrifice, "The multiplicity of actual human empirical spaces for man’s [woman's] interaction and communication may be made possible. The 'other' for Krishna's way of knowledge becomes the possibility for emancipation and radical constitution." (247) This program of emancipation requires that we not only acknowledge crisis as an element of man's life, but that we uncover its presuppositions." (248) Crisis, in this view, may lead either to despair (or Japan bashing/people bashing)- or it may engender a radical reorientation- surrender to the control of those in authority- or the kind of orientation/activity which will make knowledge transparent to itself. Claire Kramsch says much the same thing in her book, Context and Culture in Language Teaching, (1993) She argues that foreign language learning itself contains within it the means to facilitate cross-cultural communication insofar as it has an intrinsic quality of tending to deconstruct invariant structures of ways of knowing. It is principally through dialogue, in her view, that crisis/conflict can become a catalyst for change, because it involves, "fundamental realignments of value and perceptions among the participants." (232) This means that cross-cultural communication can become part of a systematic effort to desensitize one's embodied/invariant ways of knowing- the way out of the no-exist world of interacting with one's projections. Ethnocentrism is this kind of invariant way of cognizing or imagining, and Orientalism an historical instance of this fixation-projection, a stance which occludes any adequate vision of either the other or ourselves. Unfortunately, at this particular juncture in history, Orientalism seems to be the predominant context for interpretations and interactions with Asian peoples, and programs for emancipation have yet to become apart of mainstream culture.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 18Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Orient as Other The 1AC’s assumption that those in the Orient are inherently different – and therefore inferior – is the key logic that drives the wars waged by the neo-Orientalist. Viewing the people ‘out there’ as somehow different and in need of our aid – this is the assumption that makes it possible to denigrate Islam and describe it as a threat.European Journal of Social Theory, 2006 [Chiara Bottici and Benoi ̂t Challand “Rethinking Political Myth : The Clash of Civilizations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” http://est.sagepub.com/content/9/3/315, Download Date: July 17, 2010]

The role of intellectual discourse in creating a narrative of the clash between civilizations can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, explanations of the 9/11 events, which attribute the attacks to the essentially aggressive nature of Islam, insert themselves in a long tradition of studies and representations of Islam. For instance, Foreign Affairs, which in the past had hosted a long series of critical responses to Huntington’s initial article on the clash, launched a new special issue entitled ‘Long war in the making’, and its leading article argued that the real roots of the attacks on the Twin Towers lay in seventh-century Arabia, in the medieval Crusades, in the Mongol invasion and the demise of the Caliphate (Doran, 2002). The arguments put forward by this article, and the medieval miniature representing the Prophet Mohammed aggressively leading a military expedition, were simply fragments of a whole work on the myth of the threat of Islam whose origins go far back in the past. Creating blocs with opposing values, schematized violence and an aesthetical translation of these themes into icons are all key elements of what have been called ‘Orientalist’ discourses (Said, 1978). Orientalism can be understood as a mechanism at work in the social sciences, literature, music and the visual arts whereby the Orient becomes the mirror of what the Occident is not. Therefore, the end result is a negatively biased representation of the Othe r. Through such an essentialization, Islam is portrayed as a fixed blueprint that accounts for the entire socio-political and economic way of life of hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world. Examples of Orientalist literature abound. Among the most significant are the discourses about the ‘Arab mind’, which depict it as violent, backward and resistant to civil order (Patai, 1973). Other examples include the idea that Islam is and has always been an intrinsically violent religion (Crone, 1980; Pipes, 1983) and/or that it promotes political submission so that pluralism and modern freedom can never succeed in Muslim13 societies (Gellner, 1994). Scholarly literature thus provided a repertoire of topoi that are directly recalled by the icons of the work on myth, such as the image of the fanatical bearded man with an open mouth and eyes wide open or of the hooded men with the Koran and hatchet in their hands. In some cases, the media titles that we have seen above came directly from pieces of academic writing, journal articles or books: ‘The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!’ (Pipes, 1990), ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ (Lewis, 1990), ‘Terror, Islam, and Democracy’ (Boroumand and Boroumand, 2002), The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Lewis, 2003), or Onwards Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Spencer, 2002). Other titles are not directly related to violence, but still suggest adn essentially negative and threatening view of Islam: The Malady of Islam (Meddeb, 2003), What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Lewis, 2002).14 Culturalist arguments of this sort are not new since they have been widespread at least since the golden age of colonialism. A revival of these arguments was thereafter linked to the emergence of the modernization theories from the 1960s onwards. The ‘Oriental societies’ were represented as simply the negative coun- terpart of the ‘Western’ ones: discourses about their backwardness were the mere result of the application of a paradigm of modernization constructed on the basis of the European experience. These discourses followed the same mechanism at work in the colonialist literature, which was first labelled as ‘Orientalism’ by Edward Said. Through such a mechanism, the variety of a multifaceted experi- ence is reduced to a fixed and immutable bloc, the ‘Orient’, which, as its very geographical definition shows, can only exist as a negative reflex of an ‘Occident’ taken as the starting point of observation (Said, 1978). Despite Said’s (and others’) criticism, Orientalism still prevails in most of the recent literature on the Middle East, for instance, with a renewed variety of culturalist simplifications. Criticism of these new essentializations is usually referred to as ‘neo-Orientalism’. One key example of the transformation of the orientalist into a neo-Orientalist theme concerns the issues of power and violence. If, according to classical Orientalism, ‘oriental despotism’ generated quiescent and weak civil societies because the ‘strength’ of Islam prevented the rise of individualism, the neo-Orientalist explanations (that had to adapt, among others, to the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran, and to the widespread popular unrest in many Muslim majority countries) saw in Islam the origin of excessively strong civil societies wanting to take power and impose an ‘Islamic order’ (Sadowski, 1993). Thus, when Western studies present civil society as the cure for all political evils, Islam is seen as the source of a violent and hence uncivil society, whereas when the emphasis was rather on the importance of strong state structures, Islam was seen as the source of quiescent civil societies and very weak states.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 19Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---U.S. Aid/Assistance/Control The Idea that those in the East are backwards – and need the Aid of the US – whether it is to fix our problems of theirs – is problematic. The fact that affirmative only speaks from the Western point of view, not allow the self-representation of those who live in the ‘Orient’ is indicative of the affirmative’s saturation with neo-Orientalist ideas. Third World Quarterly 2003 [August, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 591-599, Dag Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s)”] jstor “abstract imaginaries of … new barbarism thesis”

ABSTRACT Imaginaries of 'terrorism' and ‘Arab mind’ backwardness can be seen as closely connected: the latter explains the former as irrational-violence thus becomes the product of backward cultures. I regard this way of representing the violence of peripheralised peoples as a specific expression of symbolic violence: new barbarism. The ‘new barbarism’ thesis implies explanations of political violence that omit political and economic interests and contexts when describing violence, and presents violence as a result of traits embedded in local cultures. New barbarism and neo-Orientalist imaginaries may serve as hegemonic strategies when the production of enemy imaginaries contributes to legitimise continuous colonial economic or political projects, as can be witnessed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Symbolic power is power to construct a hegemonic version of reality! The means of production in this sense is also the means to produce distorted images of dominated people. Hence, resistance also involves resistance to the imaginaries produced by the hegemonic power. Palestinians are victims of symbolic violence in two ways. The first is the ‘terrorist’ stigma, with which the occupying power has labelled Palestinian resistance organisations, if not the whole Palestinian population. The second way is that described by Edward Said in Orientalism. the imaginary of the ‘Arab mind’ by the Israeli writer Raphael Patai, or by Sainia Hamady’s imaginary of the temperament and character of Arabs that Said quotes: The Arabs have demonstrated tm incapacity for me abiding unity. They show lack of coordination and harmony in organization and function, nor have they revealed an ability for cooperation. Any collective action for common benefit or mutual profit is alien to them The Arab has little chance to develop his potentialities and define his position in society, holds little belief in progress and change, and finds salvation only in the hereafter? 'The production of such imaginaries dominated the writings of the early Israeli social science establishment, as has been documented by Elia Zureik? The focus was on the Palestinian as an individual actor, on his/her psychology, culture, value system, temperament and so forth. Attachments to extended kinship systems, labelled ‘familism’, were interpreted as if Arabs were resistant to Western-style industrialisation and development, and by implication, to democratisation. Raphael Patai in The Arab Mind is a telling example of this approach! Patai leans on psychological cultural explanations when he describes the stagnation and backwardness of Arabs, claiming that ‘the problem’ is rooted in mental configurations, as the title of his book suggests! Arabs have a ‘sense of marginality which never allows an Arab to detach himself from his traditional culture’, Patai writes-the Arab has a ‘proclivity to blaming others for his own shortcomings and failure. Since the West is the most readily available scapegoat, it must take most of the blame, with that goes inevitably most of the hate." Alroy, building on Patai, claims that Palestinian resistance against Israel is based on ‘basic personality traits peculiar to Arab peoples’, which refers to the notion that ‘the Arabs are a fiercely vengeful people’ .7 This imaginary of Arabs has significant political implications. For example, Waschitz asserts that ‘various social and communal groups’ (the terms used when referring to Palestinians) lack the ‘psychological readiness’, the cultural qualities that are needed to be members of a democratic society? This is the underlying message of these interpretations of Arab social organisation: Arabs or Palestinians do not have the ‘civic’ ethos necessary for political communities. The political implication is what Said has called the project of ‘0rientalism’: ‘ They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ . This is the quotation from Marx that is stated on the opening page of Orientalism. A measure of the powerfulness of states is their ability to thwart attempts to unmask that power.” ‘Terrorism’ and ‘familism’ or ‘Arab mind’ labels equally serve as powerful inventions that legitimise continuous colonial economic or political projects. The imaginaries of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Arab mind’ backwardness are closely connected. The latter explains the former as irrational-violence thus becomes the product of a backward culture. I will argue that this way of explaining the violence of peripheralised people in conflict is a form of symbolic violence, a form that has been characterised as the ‘new barbarism thesis’."

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 20Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---“Middle East” The middle is a constructed concept – analyzing the world through these inherited geographic divisions is one of the way Orientalism perpetuates itself.Shabout ‘9, has been a professor at University of North Texas since 2002, 2009 [Nada, “Are Images Global?” http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2009/nada_shabout, Download Date: July 24, 2010]

The interpretation of works of art is contingent upon a range of factors connected to the history, society and culture of both the works and the interpreters. Even in an age dominated by the visual, interpretation and translation are essential tools, although ones which inevitably bring their own complexities. We know that the meaning of an image is constructed – and that the word is part of that construction. In the case of modern and contemporary art produced in the Middle East, the relationship between the visual and the verbal is further complicated by a raft of factors that I argue currently hinder the advancement of knowledge in the field. Firstly, there is the issue of the contested terminology used to identify art made in the region. The session devoted to ‘Defining the Middle East’ at the conference ‘Contemporary Art in the Middle East’, held at Tate in early 2009, revealed the critical and sensitive nature of the issues involved in what otherwise might appear as simple of problem of nomenclature. Many of us working in the field find ourselves continuously justifying and explaining whatever terminology we use in the absence of any consensus about this question. The geopolitical term ‘Middle East’ is of course epistemologically misleading, located as it is within the constructed oppositional binary of East and West. Moreover, it can be thought of as propagating a rhetoric of hostility. How could the term represent the region’s culture, as is always asked of its art, neutrally? Although contemporary discourse calls for the acceptance and celebration of difference, in the Middle East as elsewhere, there seems to be no escaping the essentialising of the region, with its still persuasive imaginary legacy within western consciousness. In western media the Middle East is often depicted as an unchanging monolith with its roots in the doctrines of an ‘aggressive’ Islam. Consequently, a positive review of an exhibition or cultural event will note something to the effect that ‘the Middle East is not only about terror and terrorism’. Such a statement immediately locates the artworks and events within a non-aesthetic realm. At a local level, artists within the region constantly question the validity of group labels. What do Arab countries, Iran, Turkey and Israel have in common? The question of course is particularly loaded in relation to the inclusion of Israel. If one can argue for certain commonalities between Arabic-speaking countries, and accept that Turkey and Iran have a long shared history and overlapping and intersecting cultures with Arabic countries, how can the inclusion of Israel – with its very recent creation and modern history, one that it is closely bound up with Western powers – be justified? Occasionally used as an alternative, the term ‘Islamic art’ is generally rejected because of its pre-modern connotations. Arabic-speaking countries (excluding Turkey, Iran and Israel) are generally grouped under the heading of ‘the Arab world’, which in turn can justify the use of the term ‘Arab art’. Personally, I feel the term is valid because it recognises the countries’ shared historical, linguistic and cultural roots while not diminishing the differences between them. Many Arab artists, however, accept this designation only reluctantly as they would rather highlight the particularities of their own cultures, and because they reject the term’s connections with a Nasserite ideology of pan-Arabism. In the end there is – currently, at least – no agreement about a suitable term for the visual production of the region. This is perhaps a problem today for all geographical regions in an age that is obsessed by categorisation but, at least rhetorically, simultaneously rejects essentialisation. Significantly, this is a problem that seems magnified in the English language. In Arab countries artists have other concerns and are baffled by western preoccupation with this issue. In their eyes, they are Iraqi, Palestinian, Lebanese etc. artists, and Arab, too. This does not negate the importance of the issue nor relegate it to one of linguistics. It does, however, correctly locate the discussion within a Euro-American discourse, given that meanings attached to the terms were constructed largely outside of the Arab world anyway. Beyond the issue of a loaded terminology, cultural interpretations are further problematised by the use of the outdated Euro-American dialectic of tradition versus modernity in discussions of contemporary art in the Middle East.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 21Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Middle East Peace The mission to ‘restore Middle East Peace’ is nothing else but a new version of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ – reject the affirmative’s misguided view that the US is the only savior who make to ‘violent Middle Easterners’ finally find peace and harmony.Kumar. 10. assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies(Deepa Kumar. “Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush II Era”, JCI.  4-15-10. http://jci.sagepub.com/content/34/3/254.full.pdf+html) 

The classic version of this frame states that Islamic civilization is not capable of democracy and that it can only produce despotism. Because it is a static and unchanging society, it is the burden of the West to civilize, modernize, and democratize. This “White Man’s Burden” argument has been used, in different forms and guises, by all  the European powers in the past. The United States too has deployed this argument, first in the case of Iraq and then Afghanistan. The reality, however, is quite different from this rhetoric. Rather than spreading democracy, the United States has more consistently destabilized democratic movements and replaced them by dictatorships (Blum, 2000; Kinzer, 2006; Lens, 2003). After World War II, the Middle East and North Africa were rocked by national liberation struggles. Between 1932 and 1962, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, all succeeded in gaining various degrees of autonomy from the colonial overlords France and Britain. In the wake of these struggles there was a widespread mood for reform and change in region, and new political and social forces emerged. Secular Arab nationalism gained a stronghold, but socialist and communist parties also vied for political influence. U.S. Middle East policy has been motivated by one chief objective: to control the oil of that region (Yergin, 1992). Consequently, policy has been directed toward preventing the emergence of any government or movement that might threaten its dominance in the region. Viewed in this light, the progressive forces of secular Arab nationalism and socialism were seen as a threat. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, U.S. policy in the region was twofold: to minimize the influence of the Soviet Union, and to squash all leftist challenges to U.S. domination (Achcar, 2003; Dreyfus, 2005). To achieve this aim the United States maintained powerful naval forces and military bases in the region. When necessary and where possible it intervened militarily, such as in 1958 when U.S. Marines briefly entered Lebanon to block an attempt by Arab nationalist forces to topple the pro-Western government in power. It funded, trained, and armed the military and security forces of its allies to act as proxies for itsinterests (Achcar, 2003)

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 22Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---War on Terror War on Terror rhetoric is a false system whereby entire groups of people as designated as evil – when really, they just have different political objectives than the Americans do. The war on terror needs to be rejected if we are to be free of Orientalist prejudices and mindsets.Crooke ‘4, is a former British intelligence officer who worked in the Middle East, Ireland and Afghanistan. He wasthe European Union high representative, 2004 [ Alastair, December 10, “It is essential to talk to the 'terrorists'”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/10/afghanistan.comment, Downloaded July 16, 2010]

The rhetoric that we in the west are engaged in "a war on terrorism" is so embedded in our thinking that most accept the phrase without question. So people in America and Britain recoil when it is suggested that they are not facing "terrorism" in the Middle East, but something quite different: a sophisticated, asymmetrical, broad-based and irregular insurgency. Acts that we rightly label as "terrorism" do occur (and we certainly need to protect ourselves from them), but what the west is facing is a growing political insurgency. Terrorist acts are but a small tool to gain the psychological upper hand in a broader political struggle. Insistence on the terrorism label carries a high price. It has prompted the west to make the wrong assessment of what challenges we face in Muslim societies, and led us to deploy the wrong means to combat it. One piece of evidence often cited by "terrorism experts" for the war on terror is the existence of " terrorist training camps" in Afghanistan, Yemen and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. But these were not terrorist training facilities at all. I knew these camps. For 20 years they produced guerrillas, in the tens of thousands, trained in irregular warfare techniques, in modules that allowed men with different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds to mesh as a single fighting unit. They were trained to fight an insurgency against western forces and against pro-western regimes in the region. We call these fighters terrorists, but this is not the way they see themselves. By failing to call an insurgency an insurgency, we have clung to a misreading of the situation that represents all violence by Muslims as criminal and people who use violence as marginalised within their own societies. Most Muslims, it is assumed, want to emulate us and, given the opportunity, would emigrate to the west. A small proportion of Islamists, the extreme jihadists, are marginal, and have alienated many Muslims by their capricious use of violence. But for both, this is a struggle to restore the standing of Muslim societies; to assert Muslim identity and autonomy from western imposition, and to find the transition to modernity of their economies and society on Muslim terms - not on western secular ones. The west uses the pejorative tag "terrorist" to close off critical thought. Terrorists are like a cancer, the argument goes: you don't over-analyse your disease, you just kill it. This "terrorist" label is key to the mindset that projects the mistaken view that "they hate our values". The threat, we are told, is existential - "they want to destroy us". Therefore our only response can be to destroy them. Anyone who disagrees is either naive, an enemy, or guilty of legitimising the use of violence. This is wrong. We do diverge on a few values, but the overwhelming bulk of Islamists and Muslims support elections, good governance and freedom (more so than in some European states, the polls show). I have witnessed many insurgencies. The Afghan mujahideen understood warfare very well. They knew their victory was not about body counts. They understood that their task was to gain that psychological advantage and to keep it. They understood the need, day by day, that more and more people should be convinced that your current would ultimately prevail - not only in military terms, but by winning the struggle for legitimacy. Never have I seen insurgencies defeated by bombing. Traditional military thinking categorises these actions as "wearing down the enemy". Generally, it just made ordinary people mad. I recall what is described as the "Jenin paradox". The Israeli military justified an incursion into Jenin in the West Bank on the grounds that there had been 10 terrorists in the city and after the military action there were only four. The threat was reduced. Six had been killed. But to others, and to Jenin's inhabitants, there was a different perception. There had been 10 resistance fighters, the Israeli military had killed six - and now there were 24. The question is: was the use of superior military force a tool for subtraction or multiplication? This is why Conflicts Forum is calling for a new engagement with Islam. We need to recognise the "other" and acknowledge that Muslim values do not pose a threat to the strategic values of western society. Muslims do not hate our values. They hate our policies. We need dialogue at all levels. And we need to demonstrate in practical terms that there is an alternative approach beyond laying waste to large segments of the region's landscape. We believe it is possible to find common ground on the basis of respect for difference and a toleration of others.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 23Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---War on Terror War on Terror rhetoric is what enables the US military to conduct its new regime of automated warfare – it allows us to reduce an entire continent to the status of ‘target’ for our drones, but only because we have designated a set of people as inherently evil and ‘terrorist.’ Until Orientalism is rejected, the plan and its war on terror rhetoric will be used as justification for the expansion of automated war.Graham ‘6, Is a Professor at the University of Durham, 2006 [June, Stephen, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118603050/PDFSTART, Download Date: July 14, 2010]

This article has demonstrated some of the ways in which the political, discursive, material and geographical dimensions of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ rest fundamentally on dialectical constructions of urban place. Such constructions, essentially, invoke both political and public reworkings of long-standing imaginative geographies. These are shaped and legitimized to do geopolitical work. Moreover, it has been shown that the dialectical constructions of urban place which underlie the ‘war on terror’ can only really be understood if analysis stretches to cover the mutually constitutive representation of both ‘homeland’ and ‘target’ cities. Thus, this article has exposed how both urban imaginative geographies, and US military technologies, are essential foundations in maintaining and extending the neo-colonial territorial and urban constructions which lie at the heart of a US-dominated neoliberal empire. Such a perspective demonstrates the vulnerability of both US and targeted Arab cities — which both become battlespaces — and their inhabitants — who are all scrutinized as targets — to an increasingly militarized US national security state. This is especially so when this state mobilizes rhetorics of forcing global, neoliberal transformation based on ideologies of pre-emptive, technologized or ‘long’ war (Roberts et al., 2003). Tellingly, then, this article has shown how the new technological architectures of US military power — as US forces reorganize to address what they see as a single, transnational, urbanizing ‘battlespace’ — are being superimposed upon imaginative urban geographies separating valorized and demonized people and places. The unusual emphasis on the mutually constitutive roles of the portrayals of both US and Arab cities within the ‘war on terror’ within this article allows us to close by emphasizing four key conclusions. First, and crucially, it is very clear that extremely strong resonances exist between the dialectical constructions of urban places in official US ‘war on terror’ pronouncements and those in the ‘popular geopolitical’ domains, most notably the news media and video games. This points to the increasing integration of the prosecution, representation, imagination and — perhaps most important — consumption of ‘asymmetric’ and ‘urban’ warfare in the early twenty-first century. The growth of the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’ (Der Derian, 2001) that sustains this blurring is occurring as reporters become ‘embedded’ in urban combat (with the language of ‘they’re moving out’ becoming a language of ‘we’re moving out’), as theme park designers construct ‘mock’ Arab cities for US urban combat training, and as voyeuristic media both ratchet up fear about attacks in the ‘urban homeland,’ and legitimize pre-emptive war attacking ‘target’ cities. Added to this, private military corporations are soaking up huge contracts for both ‘homeland security’ and overseas military aggression and ‘reconstruction’. ‘Network-centric’ weapons like armed drones increasingly rely on digital simulations which blur imperceptibly with the simulacra of ‘shoot-’em up’ video games. And the US military themselves are now constructing Orientalist and racist video games where virtualized and stylized ‘Arab’ cities are experienced by millions of consumers as mere environments for the killing of ‘terrorists’. These act both as troop training and recruitment aids and as entertainment for US suburbanites in the urban complexes of the ‘homeland’. Importantly, then, this complex of discourses and representations — themselves the product of increasingly militarized popular and political cultures — work, on the one hand, to problematize urban cosmopolitanism in ‘homeland cities’ and, on the other, to essentialize and reify the social ecologies of ‘target’ cities in profoundly racist ways . From such symbolic violence real violence only too easily follows. Second, this article has demonstrated that the production of this highly charged dialectic — the forging of exclusionary, nationalist, imagined communities and the Othering of both those deemed ‘terroristic’ within US cities and whole swathes of our urbanizing planet — has been a fundamental prerequisite for the legitimization of the entire ‘war on terror’. The truly striking thing here is how such fundamentalist and racist constructions of urban place have their almost exact shadow in the charged representations of cities routinely disseminated by fundamentalist Islamist networks like al-Qaeda (Zulaika, 2003). Here, however, the ‘targets’ are the ‘infidel’, ‘Christian’ or ‘Zionist’ cities of the West or Israel. The theological mandate is invoked from a different source. And the sentimentalized cities and spaces of the Islamic ‘homeland’ are to be violently ‘purified’ of ‘Western’ presence in order to forcibly create a transnational Islamic space or umma which systematically excludes all diversity and Otherness through continuous, murderous force. The real tragedy of the ‘war on terror’, then, is that it has closely paralleled al-Qaeda in invoking homogeneous and profoundly exclusionary notions of ‘community’ as a way of legitimizing massive violence against innocent civilians. Strikingly, the strategies and discourses of both the Bush administration and al-Qaeda have both been based on charged, and mutually reinforcing, dialectics and imaginative geographies of place construction. Both have relied heavily on promulgating hyper-masculine notions of (asymmetric) war, invocations of some absolute theological mandate, and absolutist notions of violence to finally exterminate the enemy without limits in space or time. Both have also relied heavily on the use of transnational media systems to repeatedly project good versus evil rhetorics and spectacles of victimhood, demonization, dehumanization and revenge (Gilroy, 2003; Zulaika, 2003; Boal et al., 2005). Third, the reliance of the ‘war on terror’s’ imaginative geographies on projections of absolute difference, distance and disconnection are overlaid by, and potentially usurped through, the manifold flows and connections that link urban life in Arab cities intimately to urban life in the cosmopolitan urban centers of the USA. The binaried urban and global imaginative geographies underpinning the ‘war on terror’ are inevitably undermined by such contradictions as rapidly as they are projected. Thus, a revivified Orientalism is used to remake imaginative geographies of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, just as a wide range of processes demonstrate how incendiary such binaries now are.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 24Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---“Terrorism” The designation ‘terrorist’ is thoroughly Orientalist – it assumes that a group of people is homogenous and rigid – it refuses to allow the self-representation of those who feel they have to fight wars with terrorist tactics in order to repel Western invaders.Graham ‘6, Is a Professor at the University of Durham, 2006 [June, Stephen, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118603050/PDFSTART, Download Date: July 14, 2010]

As Paul Gilroy suggests, these: old, modern notions of racial difference appear once again to be active within the calculus [of the ‘war on terror’] that tacitly assigns differential value to lives lost according to their locations and supposed racial origins or considers that some human bodies are more easily and appropriately humiliated, imprisoned, shackled, starved and destroyed than others (2003: 263). Discourses of ‘terrorism’ are crucially important in sustaining such differential values and binaried notions of human worth (Collins and Glover, 2002). Central here is the principle of the absolute externality of the ‘terrorist’ — the inviolable inhumanity and shadowy, monster-like status of those deemed to be actual or dormant ‘terrorists’ or those sympathetic to them (Puar and Rai, 2002). The unbound diffusion of terrorist labelling within the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, moreover, works to allow virtually any political opposition to the sovereign power of the US and its allies to be condemned as ‘terrorist’. ‘Without defined shape, or determinate roots’, Derek Gregory writes, the mantle of ‘terrorism’ can now be ‘be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power’ (2003: 219, original emphasis). Those experiencing frequent ‘terrorist’ labelling by national governments or sympathetic media since 9/11 include anti-war dissenters, critical researchers,

anti-globalization protestors, anti-arms-trade campaigners, ecological and freedom of speech lobbyists, and pro-independence campaigners within nations like Indonesia allied to the US. Protagonists of such a wide spectrum of opposition to transnational US dominance are thus all too easily dehumanized or demonized. Above all, they become radically delegitimized. Who, after all, will speak out in favour of ‘terrorists’ and their sympathizers? Once achieved, this loose proliferation of ‘terrorist’ labelling works to legitimize ever-widening emergency and ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation. It sustains increasingly militarized civil and law and order policing. And it supports the construction of complex legal and geographical archipelagos operating through networked connections across many geographical scales. Within these, legal ‘states of exception’ are invoked to suspend ‘normal’ legal proceedings, but these themselves increasingly sediment out to become normalized and apparently obdurate (Agamben, 2005).

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 25Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Link---Terrorism---Language Using The Phrase “Islamic Fundamentalism/Extremists/Fanatics helps to maintain and legitimize Orientalist ideologyAmeli, 2007 [Saied R, British Muslims’ Expectations of the Government: The British Media and Muslim Representation: The Ideology of Demonisation, Published by Islamic Human Rights Commission, www.ihrc.org.uk/file/1903718317.pdf, Download Date: July 23, 2010]

All newspapers used phrases containing the word Islamic or Muslim in the reports on the following day, 12th September 2001. Each newspaper tended to have a particular way of describing who it thought were the culprits, for example, Islamic extremist, Islamic fanatics or Islamic fundamentalists or fundamentalism, and tended to use this phrase more than others, although other similar terms were used within the same article. The use of any of these phrases may not have been frequent within any one article but it normally had the desired effect of turning the reader’s attention toward a particular idea or phenomenon. In The Sun for example, although the occurrence of phrases was relatively low, they would occur in the opening paragraphs such that a framework was established within which to read the rest of the article. If it had originally stated that ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ were responsible for the attacks, later words like fundamentalist, extremist, Afghani fundamentalist or fundamentalist Afghani regime may have been used interchangeably to denote the same people. The ‘lexical choice’ of words and phrases within a particular context enables readers to gain from it implicit understandings and meanings, especially in relation to minorities and more often than not these meanings are negative (van Dijk, 2000). It is however important to differentiate between articles which were more restrained in not only their use of the chosen phrases but which gave a bal- anced argument of the incident. For example, two articles may both have contained the same phrase but the context may have been very different. One may have looked at the reasons why America was a target of this type of ter- rorist activity whereas the other may have talked about the nature of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. However, it would not be an overstatement to say that in many people’s minds the use of words such as ‘Islamic extrem- ist’ would simply have reinforced negative stereotypes regardless of the con- text of articles. The greatest impact of this kind of press reporting has proba- bly been to inflate the potential danger which ‘Islamic extremists’ pose to the Western world. Frequent use of the above phrases no doubt reinforced previ- ously held prejudices and fears about the Islamic world and Muslims living in the West. These attitudes and representations are evident in many western countries with Muslim populations. Elmasry (2002) demonstrates how in the Canadian media, especially after 9/11, “the frequent demonic portrayal and misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims has been one of the most persistent, virulent and socially significant sources of anti-Islam” (p 58). His identifica- tion of the coupling of words such as ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘ter- rorist’ with Islam or Muslim, shows a disturbing development in reporting in both print and broadcast media. Research in Europe has also reached similar conclusions recognising the media in 15 EU states as being one of the most obvious sources of Islamophobic attitudes and idea

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 26Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Alternative The alternative solves – it’s necessary to break down the concepts and ideas that created the aff harms in the first place – a broad, patient critique is necessary before any truly progressive action can be taken.

Edward Said ‘3 New ‘Preface’ to Orientalism. Penguin Books Edition (2003) p. xxii

The point I want to conclude with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like "America," "The West" or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed, their murderous effectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power. We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of under-standing can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction. Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on the contrary what I have tried to show in my book have been the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies. And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and, I would go as far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamed of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies. The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities across the globe, informed by alternative news sources and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this ((xxiii)) tiny planet. The human, and humanistic, desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, Bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to believe that (Mentalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 27Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Alternative---AT: No Action

The alternative is a pre-requisite to moving beyond Orientalism – that no alternative system of representation is offered is not what is important. Rather, it is that the alternative begins the effort to demarcate the space between Western Orientalism – the alternative as critique uses the ballot to begin the work of contesting Orientalism.

ULF SCHULENBERG ‘4 ZAA 52.4 (2004): 379-393 Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture

From The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to Representations of the Intellectual (1994) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), the question of the function of criticism, and of the worldliness of the critic or public intellectual, was one of Edward Said’s primary concerns. The best way to approach his understanding of the function of criticism is surely by discussing his most important theoretical text, The World, the Text, and the Critic. In this collection of essays Said develops his notion of a worldly and oppositional criticism. It is not easy to specify Said’s vantage point in The World, the Text, and the Critic since he fights on numerous fronts. He argues against the idea of critical noninterference and a philosophy of pure textuality. In other words, he attacks any kind of formalist, functionalist and technical criticism which utterly ignores political and social responsibility. Moreover, he underscores the depoliticization of French poststructuralism in American deconstruction (e.g., de Man), and he maintains that leftist literary studies in the U.S. are no longer oppositional but on the contrary tend to confirm prevailing values, structures, and institutions. Following Said, a clear break can be detected between the American radical movement that ended with the McCarthy era, for which the passionate rhetoric and decidedly leftist political position governing F.O. Matthiessen’s “The Responsibilities of the Critic” was typical, and the obvious incapability, or rather unwillingness, of contemporary critics to develop an oppositional, worldly, and revisionist critique of American capitalist culture. However, not only does he criticize the American ‘new New Criticism’ for its shortcomings and inadequacies, he also argues against the notorious hypostatizations of Foucault and Derrida: power and writing/ textuality. At the end of his discussion of Derrida’s texts in “Criticism Between Culture and System,” Said states: “My interest is to reinvest critical discourse with something more than contemplative effort or an appreciative technical reading method for texts as undecidable objects.” On a more general level he explicates: “Criticism cannot assume that its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text. It must see itself, with other discourse, inhabiting a much contested cultural space” (Said 1983, 224 and 225). From this it already becomes obvious that the essays collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic, which were written from 1969 to 1981, should be seen as an attempt at a redefinition of the role, the forms, and the tasks of literary and cultural criticism. Undoubtedly, this is a truly demanding project. In order to tackle the issue of criticism’s function and role, Said of course cannot avoid the question of the status of theory. I argued in my introduction that Stanley Fish claims that theory is simply not needed since our practice is always already principled and that the project of theory is a nonstarter because its goals are illusionary. In contrast, Said does not subscribe to this radical neopragmatist dismissal of theory. Concerning his attitude toward theory, his essay “Traveling Theory” is particularly valuable. Said elucidates his notion of traveling theory by discussing Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Lucien Goldmann’s Le Dieu caché (1955), as well as texts by Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault. On Said’s account, Lukács’ early and most important text illuminates what happens when consciousness moves from the capitalist world of reified objects into the world of theory. That is, when it leaves behind the world of isolated empirical givens, it frees itself from the power of capitalist reification and commodification, and thereby starts comprehending history and society as a whole. This also concerns the centrality of the concept of totality for Lukács’ text, of course (think of Fredric Jameson’s reading of Lukács in this context). For our purposes, however, it is crucial to recognize that Said interprets this refusal of consciousness to be confined to the reified and fragmented world of objects as an “insurrectionary act.” The will and the desire to go beyond empiricity, to leave the world of practice and its distortions, and to seek the plane of theory is “an act of political insurgency.” Said writes: “To attain to theory is to threaten reification, as well as the entire bourgeois system on which reification depends, with destruction” (Said 1983, 233). As regards the early Lukács, and Said’s suggestions are pertinent here, the act of theorizing can be termed an act of resistance. Theory for Lukács “was what consciousness produced, not as an avoidance of reality but as a revolutionary will completely committed to worldliness and change” (Said 1983, 234). This commitment to worldliness and change is precisely what Said was missing in the American theoretical landscape of the 1980s, and what he was desperately missing with regard to the state of literary and cultural criticism in general. It is important to understand that Said does not advocate abstract and totalizing theory in this essay (grand theory as the straw man of many neopragmatists), but that he, on the contrary, underlines that “theory must never lose touch with its origins in politics, society, and economy” and that it moreover ought to be regarded as “a response to a specific social and historical situation” (235 and 237). In contrast to a materialist theorist such as Jameson, who often comes close to presenting himself as a paradigmatic grand theorist, Said, not identifying himself as a Marxist, draws attention to what could be called a certain theoretical modesty (on Jameson, cf. Schulenberg 2001). Although “we certainly need theory,” he emphasizes “that there is no theory capable of covering, closing off, predicting all the situations in which it might be useful.” Theory, in other words, “can never be complete” (Said 1983, 241). Differentiating between theory and critical consciousness, Said argues that the latter is synonymous with an awareness of the resistances to theory. Critical consciousness prevents theory from losing contact with the time and place from which it emerges, it situates theory, historicizes it, and measures its effectiveness and limitations with regard to certain situations and tasks. As far as the job of the worldly critic is concerned, Said explicitly states that this is to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory. (242) Instead of clinging to basic dichotomies such as foundational vs. non-foundational theory, Said seeks to demarcate a discursive space which can function as a kind of mediation between theory and practice. Theory is necessary, but theoretical closure (system-building as an extreme form) has to be anathematized. Said radically historicizes theory, opens it up toward historical reality and contingency, and thereby illustrates that theory, pace Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and Steven Knapp, does not always necessarily intend to govern and dominate practice from an external position but that it can also present itself, in a Westian manner, as re visable, provisional, fallible, and heuristic (see Knapp and Michaels 1985). In spite of the fact that Said was not influenced by antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, antirepresentationalism, or antirealism to the same degree as Cornel West, their gesture of holding on to theory and their simultaneous awareness of its productive limitations are similar. In addition, both return the text of criticism to the world by demonstrating its situatedness and by stressing that the critic has to operate within various networks of worldly affiliations, just like the literary text. Criticism, as Said and West make clear, is an act of political and social engagement that takes place in the world and that tries to prepare the ground for future change . In the context of his discussion and critique of Foucault’s somewhat excessive and partly undifferentiated use of the term pouvoir, Said offers an interesting opportunity to contrast his worldly criticism with Fish’s thought. Whereas

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 28Sophs Orientalism KFish holds that we are governed by our interpretive communities or systems of intelligibility, and that we are incapable of reaching an outside to these systems with their rigid norms and standards, Said repeatedly underscores in The World, the Text, and the Critic that the theorizing of resistance and difference, that is, the allowance for counterhegemony, is possible because there is such an outside. Leftist worldly and oppositional criticism needs to demarcate precisely this outside to hegemonic systems in order to articulate its notion of resistance and its desire for change. Said points out: In human history there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible, limits power in Foucault’s sense, and hobbles the theory of that power. (246-7) This indicates that Said’s oppositional criticism seeks to revitalize concepts such as resistance, social change, and hope (in a non-Rortyan sense) in order to initiate the resuscitation of leftist critique in the U.S. and late capitalism in general. Resistance, for instance, is “a matter of central relevance” to his argument in The World, the Text, and the Critic (27; cf. also Said 1993, 252-65 and 288-340). In this context, it is interesting to note that the act, and theorizing, of resistance is also an important aspect of Humanism and Democratic Criticism, where Said elaborates on the fact that his version of a worldly and oppositional humanism cannot be imagined without the concept of resistance (see Said 2004, 70-8). It is crucial to consider the status of my suggestions: I am not primarily asking whether Said’s notions of (local) resistance and social change ought to be considered as potentially effective means of a radical cultural politics. Also, I am not elaborating on theory’s ‘real’ chances of connecting with and opening up toward historical reality and society. It goes without saying that these are incredibly complex questions that ask for book-length studies. For my purposes in this article, I simply wish to call attention to Said’s gesture of holding on to the venerable concepts of resistance, hope, and social change. This gesture, within a dialogical, nondogmatic, and dialectical theoretical framework, is still of importance, I propose, with respect to the contemporary situation of theory in the U.S. One should also think of the interchanges between the fields of American Studies, postcolonial studies, and transnational cultural studies in this context (cf. Rowe 2004). The aforementioned gesture could be seen as a common point of reference for these fields.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 29Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---2NC---AT: Perm

The permutation allows a more hidden form of Orientalist – the policies continue under the guise of rejecting Orientalism, but this allows the ideologies to become even more invidious and dangerous

European Journal of Social Theory, 2006 [Chiara Bottici and Benoi ̂t Challand “Rethinking Political Myth : The Clash of Civilizations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” http://est.sagepub.com/content/9/3/315, Download Date: July 17, 2010]

However, in order to reconstruct the work on myth, one should not only look at more or less explicit claims and theories about the threat of/to Islam. As we have seen, the power of myth is much stronger when it can be conveyed by icons that only subtly recall the whole work on myth and that can thus slip into our mental consciousness as part of the lens through which we look at the world. Thus, even in a context where Orientalism is apparently rejected, there can be a space for the work on myt h . For instance, it can be argued that even John Rawls’s attempt to propose a normatively desirable and practically viable set of laws of peoples can be the site for the work on myth. One of the most original aspects of his theory is precisely his attempt to include in the society of peoples even peoples who cannot be labelled as ‘just’ according to his theory. To this aim, he proposes an imaginary example of a non-liberal people, which he calls ‘Kazanistan’ (Rawls, 1999: 5, 75–8). This mental experiment, which is appar- ently neutral as such, and is even aimed at admitting this hypothetical non-liberal people into the society of peoples, is a potential site for the work of the myth of the clash between civilizations. How can it be so? In the first place, its name ‘Kazanistan’ is not so innocent, because it cannot but recall in the readers’ mind countries with similar names – the name being apparently a cross between ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘Kazakhstan’, two Muslim majority countries. What can these names evoke for the American reader of the end of the millennium? On the other hand, the fact that the ‘imagined’ Kazanistan is a Muslim country is not left to the imagination of the readers, given that Rawls says so explicitly in the Intro- duction of his book (Rawls, 1999: 5). Why, however, should it be assumed that a non-liberal people has to be Muslim? Even if the general argument of the book is that a clash between the imagined Muslim country and the ‘liberal democratic peoples’ is not unavoidable, still the very construction of such a mental experi- ment recalls some of the topoi of the (neo-)Orientalist literature about Muslim countries – first, the idea that a Muslim country cannot be ‘liberal’ in Rawls’s sense, that it cannot be democratic but allows, in the best case scenario, a consul- tation hierarchy (Rawls, 1999: 77), that it will not separate the state from the church and can at best enable the toleration of religious minorities, and that, like most Muslim rulers, rulers of Kazanistan are likely to have sought to build an empire (1999: 76). To sum up using Rawls’s own terms, a Muslim country can at best be ‘decent’ (1999: 76). As Talal Asad also observed (2003), the construction of an Islamic threat, which began long before 9/11 and even Huntington’s book, is precisely the result of the application of modern Western categories and as such it becomes impossible to disentangle the two processes. For instance, Asad emphasizes that the zealotry so characteristic of many Islamic political movements in recent times as well as their ideal of an Islamic state, in which no distinction operates between state and religion, is not a product of the mainstream historical tradition of Islam. Rather, in his view, it is the product of the totalizing ambitions typical of modern politics and of the modernizing state. As he shows in his work, in the Islamic history, ‘there was no such thing as a state in the modern sense’. This is not to say that the fact that many contemporary Islamist movements have endorsed the idea is irrelevant – which is obviously not the case. It simply means that the fact that many Islamic militants have accepted this perspective as their own, striving for the establishment of an Islamic state, does not make it essential to Islam (Asad, 2003: 352).18 On the other hand, this essentialization of Islam favoured and most of the time went hand in hand with an over-emphasis on its intrinsic violence. This image of an essentially violent Islam is, in Asad’s view, the reflex of a perceived threat to Western values.19 The violence of Islamist radical movements is taken as a symbol of the violence of Islam itself, whereas no liberal in the west would suggest that the Gush Emunim [‘Block of the Faithful’, a Jewish pro-settler group in Israel] represent the essence of Judaism, or that the assassination of abortion doctors in the U.S. by pro-Life activists represents the essence of Christianity. (Asad, 2003: 350) The fact that many Islamic militants have reinterpreted the idea of an Islamic state as part of their Islamic tradition points to the parallel process of construc- tion of an Islamic civilization on the part of the Muslims. ‘Orientalism’, which was born in the West, has also been re-appropriated by non-Western individuals, scholars or not. For instance, in 1992, the Saudi King Fahd declared that ‘the prevailing democratic system in the world is not suitable for us in this region, for our peoples’ composition and traits are different from the traits of that world’ (quoted in Sadowski, 1993: 14).20 Other neighbouring countries nowadays use this type of argument, according to which Arab citizens are convinced on a daily basis that democracy is not possible in their country. Similar arguments are frequently found in the literature produced by ‘oriental orientalists’ or ‘western- ized orientalists’, to use the expression coined by Sadiki (2004): Ajami (2002) has become a mouthpiece for Arab support of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, predicting that US soldiers would be greeted with flowers in Iraq, and Zakaria (1997) wrote abundantly about illiberal democracies in the region. The clash of civilizations is not just a Western political myth that has been exported and imposed on the non-Western world. The work on this myth is a work that has taken place in different contexts, each time assuming different connotations and providing significance to very different political conditions: from Al-Qa’eda terrorists incited by their leaders to violent acts against the ‘impure West’ to the re-elaboration of the post-9/11 shock all around the world. The consequences of the work of this myth in Arab countries are well illumi- nated by Telhami (2004). In his view, there has always been a variety of political possibilities for self-identification in the Arab worlds – at least, just to mention some of the most important, pan-Arabism, Islam and nationalism as embedded in single individual states. However, a survey he conducted in June 2004 in six Arab countries revealed that more and more Arabs identify themselves as Muslims first. Telhami observed that this trend is pretty clear, even though it is not uniform, given that in Egypt and Lebanon, in contrast to Saudi Arabia and Morocco, people identify themselves as Egyptians and Lebanese more than Arabs and Muslims. A parallel increase in the role of religion can be witnessed in Western countries.21 Some, for instance, have noticed the increasing role of religious argu- ments in public and political debates. Well-known examples are the recurrence of debates on religious symbols such as the crucifix or veils in European schools, the role of religious lobbies in US politics, or recently, the debate that took place in Europe about the inclusion or not of reference to the Christian roots in the drafting of the European Constitution. However, what is more interesting for us is the increased symbolic presence of religious icons of the clash between civiliza- tions.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 30Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---2NC---AT: Perm The perm still links – even if it rejects manifest Orientalism in all instances except the plan, it still keeps intact the latent Orientalist assumptions about the world and about the enemy the 1ac tries to fightEdward Said ’77 Orientalism p. 206

The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. In the nineteenth-century writers I analyzed in Chapter Two, the differences in their ideas about the Orient can be characterized as exclusively manifest differences, differences in form and personal style, rarely in basic content. Every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability; this is why every writer on the Orient, from Renan to Marx (ideologically speaking), or from the most rigorous scholars (Lane and Sacy) to the most powerful imaginations (Flaubert and Nerval), saw the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption. The Orient existed as a place isolated from the mainstream of European progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Thus whatever good or bad values were imputed to the Orient appeared to be functions of some highly specialized Western interest in the Orient. This was the situation from about the 1870s on through the early part of the twentieth century—but let me give some examples that illustrate what I mean.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 31Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---2NC AT: “They Want Withdrawal” Internalized Orientalism does not mean the plan solves the link – it just proves the pervasiveness of the problemMert, 2010 [June 17, Nuray, Hurriyet Daily News“Being ‘Orientalist’ or becoming ‘Middle Eastern’ - Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review” http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=being-8216orientalist8217-or-becoming-8216middle-eastern8217-2010-06-17, Download Date: July 22, 2010]

These are not the issues that can be explained in an article deservedly. But I’ve tried to write about how I look at the “shift of political axis.” I said my real concern was the danger of a “shift in the axis of democracy” in national politics via a shift in foreign policy of Turkey. In the meantime, internal politics turning more authoritarian every day and the setup is via anti-Semitism. I said this will take Turkey closer to the Middle East, not the authoritarian political scene of the Middle East. But saying is one thing and adopting an “Orientalist” language by using a term like “becoming Middle Eastern” is another. Kadir Gürsel of Milliyet daily in his article “To be or not to be Middle Eastern” (June 14, 2010) adopts a somewhat sharper and more direct language as opposed to what some imply indirectly. “In the political culture of the Middle East,” he wrote “theocracy, fundamentalism, monarchism, authoritarianism, nepotism, tribalism, sectarianism, pressuring religious and ethnic minorities, genociders and insults to women are together. In addition to all these, can you point out a single positive dominant element?” Now, at this point, I want to say to him “Wait a minute.” To say “Let’s look at today’s Middle East, we see authoritarian regimes, monarchism, sectarianism etc. So we have to question all these and save ourselves from a romantic atmosphere of the Middle East,” which is one thing. To read all negativities of mankind into the political culture of the Middle East - such an approach is the very self of “Orientalism,” which reads what is “historic” into “cultural.” And this is not different from “anti-Semitism” and “Occidentalism,” which sees the West as the center of all evil. Moreover, Orientalism is a hegemonic approach bothering the mind of men excessively via colonialism. Aside from the Western look to the East, not only in Turkey but in non-Western countries, the “internalization of Orientalism” dominates. What I mean by “internalized Orientalism” is “being part of Orientalism” or “penetration into Orientalism.” In other words, it is to look down on the West, or the Arab, or non-Western everything. It is to experience an inferiority complex because of seeing one’s self in this angle. Apparently, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to refer to this angle as part of his latest “Arab” initiative! However, his referrals are problematic, just like the “Arab initiative” itself. First of all, the only reason why Turkey has been standing at a distance from the Arab World or the Middle East for a long time is not the “internalized Orientalism” that undoubtedly dominates the republican period of Turkey. The main element here is political preferences of the Cold War period! Secondly, the approach that Erdoğan complains about - “Some name their dogs after Arabs” - stands on a different reference point. Let me elaborate this: Although the word “Arab” has been modified in our culture, since the Ottoman period, we have meant not the Arab nation but dark-skinned people by the word “Arab.” I am not saying to make an excuse for “naming dogs after Arabs.” To the contrary, the issue turns more racist at this point. Secondly, negative remarks about Arabs have not been explored in the Republican era. The Ottomans term Arabs as “Noble People” (kavm-i necip) and come up with idioms involving the term. This, in general, is about the Ottoman aristocratic looking to all people. For this reason exactly, Turks are termed as “unperceptive” (etrak-ı bi idrak). At milestones of history, in particular, historic prejudices, national/religious identities, Orientalism, “internalized Orientalism” etc. all these concepts and categories should be re-checked. Let’s mull over them. At this point, again, let’s discuss the issue of “anti-Semitism.” On this particular subject, lastly, I see Deputy Prime Minister Hüseyin Çelik’s interview with Devrim Sevimay of Milliyet daily on June 14. Clearly, he is not convincing when Çelik blames the single-party period for the anti-Semitic approach in Turkey and ignores the anti-Semitic tradition that appears as a mentality trying to link anything negative to Jews. It seems that, however, those who have adopted a way of thinking that reads history as a “Jewish plot” and links every ill to Jews easily uses “anti-Semitic” language. On the other hand, those who start from an Orientalist approach find themselves in the very same language. In the end, unless everyone stops labeling each other and starts questioning himself/herself first, we will not be able to discuss the issue properly. Most importantly, what we call “discussion” is not “brainstorming.” We always forget that debates are the final resort of democratic politics. If we lose it, everyone will pay the price! * Ms. Nuray Mert is a columnist for the daily Radikal, in which this piece appeared Thursday. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 32Sophs Orientalism K

Orientalism---Framework---AT: “Policy Relevance” The idea that scholars must be ‘policy relevant’ is both wrong and false – that is, it overly-simplifies the relation of theory to practice, and it assumes that only governments matter when it comes to ideas. Instead, we should reject the narrow-minded idea that only policy-relevance matters by seeing the power that ideas have in shaping reality. Good policy makers listen to theorists – they do not live in a vacuum.

PINAR BILGIN ‘4, Department of International Relations, Bilkent University (Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2, “Is the Orientalist past the future of Middle East studies?”)

Third, policy-relevance was the keyword of the early years of the Cold War for both area specialists and disciplinary generalists alike. As Steven Bernstein et al have noted, disciplinary generalists' 'commitment to social science flowed from an even deeper commitment-to use disciplined methodologies to generate knowledge that would help prevent the horrors of war and fascism and improve the world around them'.47 As time progressed, this vision was lost among the disciplinary generalists, for some of whom 'scientific means' has become an end in itself. On the other hand, 'those who [did] study policy problems frequently [did] so in isolation from those working seriously with theory'. 48 A similar split occurred among area specialists for reasons that had less to do with the impact of Orientalism than with broader trends in international studies. In this sense, what Kramer presents as unique to Middle East studies was also experienced by the disciplines in that, over the years, links between university-based scholars and policy makers weakened while another group (mostly located in think-tanks) produced policy-relevant (supposedly) theory-free work. Kramer's ideal Middle East specialist is a modern day Machiavelli who produces knowledge to inform policy making. Critics of such a relationship have for long maintained that governments do not merely seek information when they consult scholars; they also seek the 'legitimation of government policy through the reproduction and dissemination of the canons of official orthodoxy'.49 Besides, they argue, scholars should resist the 'siren song of policy relevance' and make use of the privilege and marginal advantage created by their detach-ment rather than engaging in immediate policy issues.50 It is possible to explain away these opposing views by referring to the gap between theory and practice and stating that scholars and policy makers each have a false image of what the other does.51 Such explanations rest upon the assumption that theory and practice could be thought of as totally separate activities. However, the choice is not necessarily one of choosing to inform policy making or not; there are deeper issues involved. Setting the scholar's dilemma as one of deciding whether to inform policy making or to isolate him/herself in the ivory tower, rests on a very narrow conception of theory as well as practice. For theory is not limited to abstractions about world politics. Policy makers themselves adopt one theory or another, although they may not be aware of or open about it. It is the task of the scholar to reflect upon and warn policy makers of their unquestioned assumptions. Kramer's view of practice is also narrow because he understands practice as government policy making. However, there exist other actors (non-governmental actors, students or scholars who teach and/or engage in activism of one sort or another) whose practices theory seeks to inform. Even those scholars who do not address the policy agenda could foster change by questioning existing assumptions and challenging common sense. This is what Said sought to do in his lifetime.52 One final point relates to Kramer's submission that Middle East studies has 'failed' its major funder, the US government, and that the remedy would be found by going back to its roots in Oriental studies to re-establish links between Middle East scholarship and policy making. Although Middle East studies could be considered to have 'failed' on the surface by failing to produce 'problem-solving theory' and thus alienating US policy makers, it could be considered to have 'succeeded' at a much deeper level. For Middle East studies has come to shape the thinking of Middle East specialists around the world; shaping knowl-edge is the ultimate sign of power. Thanks to Middle East centres based in US universities, an American prevalence exists in Middle East studies: the thinking patternsa nd modes of representationu sed by Middle East specialists aroundt he world are shaped by this 'American invention'. 53 The phenomenon of the 'indigenisation' of Middle East studies in the USA (poked fun at by the critics who say that the Middle East Studies Association has changed 'from an American organization interested in the Middle East to a Middle Eastern one that happens to meet in the United States')54 could be viewed as a sign of 'success' for Middle East studies. Whatever the immediate policy implications of research conducted in area studies centres might have been, at a deeper level, they have been highly influential in laying down the rules that enable one to 'write, speak, listen and act meaningfully'55-t hat is, through inside out. Such a development would have been unfathomable within the limits imposed by the Oriental studies tradition that rested on the Orient/Occident divide and did not allow the 'Middle East' to represent itself.56 Those who make a case for Middle East studies going back to its Orientalist roots would do well to rethink the deeper impact this academic field has made over the years.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 33Sophs Orientalism K

***Orientalism Aff

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 34Sophs Orientalism K

Aff---Orientalism---Perm Solvency

The perm solves best – we should use the plan to break down Orientalism worldviews. Orientalism is best challenged bit by bit – a strategy that tries to reject it all at once will never succeed.

Varisco ‘7 [ Daniel Martin, “Reading Orientalism – Said and the Unsaid” Publisher: Seattle : University of Washington Press,]

I have no desire to repeat Said’s uncritical mistake and stop short of suggesting an alternative to the poleinical path of Orientclism- We need to escape the faults of bias and distortion in representation of real people and their real history as well as the imaginative discourses that invade all historical understanding. This can best be accomplished by adapting rather than rejecting the available tools developed within the very guilds Said relegates to the latrines. Much of the available criticism documented here offers ways in which the target of Said’s rhetoric can be more credibly analyzed. Linguists are far more capable today of analyzing Oriental languages in a comparative sense because of the insights of earlier philologists and the Sheer force of experience in diverse contexts. Historians, like archaeologists have improved methods for looking at the material remains of daily life, including scraps of ordinary writing, to create a better understanding than Canonized texts afford on their own. It is still necessary to read Herodotus, for example, but what a more enlightening reading is possible given the fragments still visible of the real world that writers like Herodotus recorded. Anthropologists, never comfortable sitting above it all in academic armchairs, both learn and unlearn through the dialect of living with real Orientals and speaking in their native languages. Increasingly, ethnographers work with native intellectuals rather than simply parroting an outsiders perspective. Contemporary historians of Islam, no longer motivated by a desire to defend a beleagured Christian view, study the diversity of Muslims as well as the trajectory of their complex textual tradition. Political scientists and economists debate views from the far right to the let. Contrary to what a reading of Orientalism today might suggest, the right kind of scholarly work is there; some of it has been there all along. In reading Orientalism, I have not only shown the many rhetorical excesses and historical flaws in Said’s thesis but have also suggested ways in which scholars have contributed to a less biased and more nuanced understanding of the real Orient. Moving beyond the East-West binary requires an academic approach that emphasizes the continued improvements of methods to reach a less biased representation of the other while recognizing the inevitable ethnocentricity in us all. Moving beyond the politics of blame requires a switch from the rhetoric of polemic to civil academic debate with a measure of intellectual tolerance for opposing viewpoints. It would certainly help to shift the focus away from demagogic cultural criticism to informed analysis of cultures through refined methodologies. No single specialization has the answers. But this should be a call to cooperate in a joint concern for ferreting out discernable truths rather than disparaging individuals and academic disciplines. Rather than the lone oppositional critic lashing out at an untidy world, I propose the model advocated by my colleague Jacques Berlinblau, that “ a public intellectual/sideration, writes in a lucid prose, clarifies complex issues, apprises readers of ‘inconvenient facts,’ advocates unpopular opinions, questions and reveals his or her own motivations in doing so, and yes, ultimately, if possible, comes to a decision about the issue at hand. The challenge at hand is to contribute to a better, not eternally fixed, understanding of the other. If the idealized notion of Orient is an invention through discourse it should also be capable of being reinvented through sound scholarship. Serious academic study of Middle Eastern cultures and Islam, despite the limitations and prejudices of individual scholars, is not hostage to a latent hegemonic discourse in which representations of an imagined Orient of East is condemned to be inherently racist, sexist, and ideologically driven. Rather than succumb to the hubris of polemicists who make dogmatic assertions or manipulate history with Whiggish intent, the contemporary student of Middle Eastern cultures, or of any cultural setting, should focus on the question of fit with an assumed and irreducibly reality worth studying. The dreaded fork in the road to recovery need not be reduced to the choice between orthodoxic nihil obstat and Nietzschean orthodoxy. There is something real that is worth being conceptualized by and beyond the term “Orient.” Orientalism can be conjured, constricted, constructed, and deconstructed ad nauseam, tasks quite Herculean if done right but absurdly Sisyphean if carried on in the right same old spirit of competitive intellectualizing. What was once a broad field of geographical and cultural specialization will not go away, Said’s book notwithstanding, because the real Orient is not about to fade from view. Let us agree, at least in principle, on the following truisms at the start of the third millennium. All scholars, no matter how careful and sincere, carry with them assumptions and expectations from their own cultures and individual socialization. All generalizations about people’s ideas, beliefs, and behavior essentialize to some extent, invariably along an ethnocentric fault line. Representation, especially by someone writing in another language or from an outsider’s perspective, is never going to be an exact duplication, nor one that can effectively distill manifest difference into a whole meaningful to all. I am not so naïve as to assume that the damage of an opportunistic East-West clash can simply be wished away, but neither do I doubt our ability to whittle away at bias and misinformation by using the methodologies of critical scholarship from established but evolving disciplines. If we cannot lay to rest the ghosts of Orientalism past, at least we can stop being frightened out of our critical scholarship by such a troublesome specter. I conclude by suggesting that the best way to battle misleading binary thinking is to get on with sound academic scholarship and spend less time rhetorically damning the binary itself or reconstructing incomplete genealogies of intellectual history

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 35Sophs Orientalism K

Aff---Orientalism---Link Turn/Perm Solvency Turn: the affirmative withdrawals from _____ - this is a reduction in Orientalist policiesCrooke ‘10, He has worked with Islamist movements for more than 20 years, serving until 2003 as an EU mediator charged with negotiating and facilitating various ceasefires and agreements with Islamist movements, 2010 [Alastair, July The Washington Quarterly • 33:3 pp. 7—20 “The Shifting Sands of State Power in the Middle East”

The last great Western intervention into the Middle East, from approximately 1821 —1922, left behind a gaping void eventually filled by the colonial powers, Britain and France. But as leaders of the regional states and Islamist movements survey the coming era, they see no prospect of a repetition of this earlier experience. What they see is a gradual decrease in Western influence as the United States and its allies reduce their forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the first time in centuries, therefore, there will be no external powers stepping into any void. There will also be no Chinese or Russian intervention_at least not in the colonial sense of a massive political intervention. The realignment of trade, technology, and investment toward the East no doubt will continue its relentless creep, in line with the states’ ‘‘look East’’ policies. China and Russia will certainly play their part, but as partners not as powers. This new era, therefore, is likely to be heralded by a fierce struggle for influence. Unlike the 1920s, it will not take the form of external powers jockeying between themselves, but it will be waged internally by the actors_ state and non-state_for the future of the region. And it is likely to be a bitter one, both at the conventional political level and within Islam. The economic and social stresses of the coming years will call for new responses. The ability of states and Islamist movements to respond to these stresses, to find the Islamic harmonies through which to answer the sharp notes of popular emotion, and to find a visual language by which ordinary Muslims can imagine a new future and a way of living are the tests that lie ahead.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 36Sophs Orientalism K

Aff---Orientalism---No Impact Impure Orientalist representations are inevitable – it’s better to work with them rather than reject them out of hand

Macfie, 2010 [A. L. “Orientalism: a reader” NYU Press, http://books.google.com/books?id=izpNLWUxp5IC&pg=PA304&lpg=PA304&dq=epistemology+orientalism+%22knowledge+and+power%22&source=bl&ots=LKDYGixWU8&sig=IyxigCH8QlFtKOU5gKI6xN_JXxE&hl=en&ei=S2E8TJn1K4XonQeJta2hDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=alternative&f=false, Download Date: July 12, 2010]

more detail. For now we will look at some of the implications that arise from the apparent ‘fictionality' of the Oriental construct. The problem that arises here is that if such representations are false then there has at least to be the possibility of a representation that is ‘true'. Towards the end of the book, Said appears to recognize this problem. He writes: ‘l would not have written a book of this sort if I did not believe that there is a scholarship that is not as corrupt, or at least as blind to human reality, as the kind I have been mainly depicting’.7 He is even able to give us an example: ‘the anthro- pology of Clifford Geertz, whose interest in Islam is discrete and concrete enough to he animated by the specific societies and problems studied and not by the rituals, preconceptions, and doctrines of Orienralism’.' Yet, five years later. we find that the work of Geertz has been miraculously transformed into being simply ‘standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory clichés . . .‘.9 We are given no indication of what might have caused this extraordinary transformation. That Said feels under no compunction to justify his change of opinion here is indicative of his methodological approach. As he felt no necessity to explain what it was specifically that made the work of Geertz admirable in the first place so, it appears, he is not called upon to explain a radical change of opinion. ln |978 he had been seeking to place himself within ‘Western’ discourse, almost in the role of a radical reformer. By 1983, he is clearly seeking to orient his critique differently, seeking to find a place within a 'space' of anti-imperialist studies, in which the work of Geertz does not fit. This much is apparent in his article ‘Orientalism Revisited?’ in which he plays down the originality of his own study, to place it in a line of anti-colonialist writers who seem to have nothing but this, and the fact that Said approves them, in common.” What he is keen to establish is a catch-all critique providing the means to dispose of what he finds objectionable and to praise whatever be approves. This is exactly the power relation that he accuses the Orientalists of constructing in relation to the Orient. Unlike the Orient itself, however, contemporary Orientalists have the power to answer back, and not surprisingly they have not hesitated to do so. Said's pathetic response to some of these counterblasts indicates the weakness of his position. which he is incapable of defending, except by constantly shifting his ground." The more substantial question raised (or. one could equally argue, hidden) by Said's critique is the nature of reciprocity between subject and object. In this respect the extent that Said has adequately represented what the Orientalists themselves have said is largely irrelevant. His argument rather stands or falls on his denial of such a reciprocal relationship. Orientalism was imposed upon the Orient: it was a European project, more or less consciously elaborated, in which Orientalists were nothing but passive pawns. Whether or not Orientalist representations were accurate or not thereby becomes some-what irrelevant.

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 37Sophs Orientalism K

Aff---Orientalism---Alternative Doesn’t Solve

The Alt can’t solve – it relies upon an overly simplistic idea of Orientalism and prevents self-representation of the Arab world. The alternative continues the Western tactic of trying to speak for those in the Arab world, instead of letting them represent themselves.

Macfie, 2010 [A. L. “Orientalism: a reader” NYU Press, , Download Date: July 12, 2010]

Despite a predominantly unfavorable response among reviewers in learned journals (with the curious exception of The journal of the American Oriental Society, the house organ of American Orientalists), Said‘s Orientalism has had a considerable impact. The success of this book and the ideas or, to be more precise, the attitudes that it expresses, in spite of its science fiction history and its lexical Humpty- Dumptyism, requires some explanation. One reason is certainly its anti- Westernism - the profound hostility to the West but more particularly the liberal and democratic West, since Germany is accorded a partial and Russia a total exemption. This responds well to the sentiments of those in the West, and especially in the United States, who condemn their country as the source of all the evil in the world as arrogantly and absurdly as their forbears acclaimed it as the source of all good. Similarly, the book appeals by its use of the ideas and still more of the language of currently fashionable literary, philosophical, and political theories. It meets the world’s growing need for simplification by reducing all the complex national, cultural, religious, social, and economic problems of the Arab world to a single grievance directed against a small group of easily identified and immediately recognizable malefactors. There is, as anyone who has browsed in a college bookshop knows, a broad market for simplified versions of complex problems. Precisely this kind of simplification, so attractive to Western readers, has evoked the most serious critique of anti- Orientalism among Arab writers and thinkers who feel that the best interests of their society and the solving of its genuine problems cannot be served by the blurring of issues and the naming of scapegoats. Some help in answering this question may be found in another important fact - that this hostility to Orientalists is by no means universal or even dominant in Arab countries. Many of the Orientalists most violently attacked by the Saidian and related schools have taught generations of Arab students and have been translated and published in Arab countries." Arab scholars working in the various fields with which the Orientalists have been concerned - history, literature, language, philosophy, and others - have made normal use of Orientalist publications. They have contributed extensively to Orientalist journals and have participated generally in Orientalist symposia, colloquia, and other international activities. Arab scholars have often differed from Orientalists in their findings and judgments, just as Arab scholars and Orientalist scholars have differed among themselves. These have, for the most part, been scholarly differences, not clashes of ethnic or ideological alle- giances, and they have been discussed within the norms and courtesies of scholarly debate. The hue and cry against the Orientalists was raised not by scholarly colleagues interested in their work and competent to evaluate it but from quite other sources. Significantly, the critique of the Orientalists has evoked a powerful and increasing countercritique from Arab writers. Although for the most pan they share the disenchantment of the anti-Orientalists with Western civilization and their resentment at what the West has done in the Arab lands, these Arab writers are appalled by the smug, self-satisfied, and naively simplistic explanations that the critics offer of the disasters that the Arab world has suffered and the problem that it still faces. In a brilliant essay, the Egyptian philosopher Fu'ad Zakaria divides the anti-Orientalists into two main categories. The first school of criticism is religious and apologetic, a defense of the integrity and perfection of Islam against what they see as an attack by hostile forces, variously described as Christians, missionaries, Jews, Marxists, atheists, and the like, seeking no undermine and discredit Islam in order to impose their own beliefs. For the most part, these critics do not know the languages in which the Orientalists write and ate therefore obliged to rely on quotations and a few translations. More important, they have no understanding whatever of the kind of modern critical scholarship of which Western Orientalism is a part and so are, for example, quite unaware that modem Western scholars are at least equally merciless in analyzing their own religious and cultural traditions. The second group, according to Professor Zakaria, attack Orientalism from a political-cultural and not from a religious point of view. Indeed, the most vocal among them are not Muslims at all but are Christian or post-Christian expatriates living in Western Europe or the United States. They are perfectly familiar with modem Western secular civilization and its scholarly culture as well as its languages. Therefore, in this respect, they are able to wage war against the Orientalists with their own weapons. But they have a serious weakness - the poor knowledge that most of them possess of the classical Arab, Islamic civilization of which they claim to be the defenders. Here they are at a disadvantage not only as compared with the Muslim apologists but also as compared with the Orientalists themselves. If the defenders of Islam have a naive and essentialist view of the West about which they know so little, the Westernized defenders of the Arab political and cultural heritage have an equally naive and essentialist view of the realities of this heritage in the past and the predicament of its heirs at the present. The illusions offered by the anti-Orientalists can only worsen this predicament by delaying or impeding the cold, critical self-analysis that must procede any serious effort for improvement . After examining the methods and modalities of anti-Orientalism in some detail, Professor Zaltaria ends with a psychosocial analysis of the motives of both the Orientalists and their two types of opponent. In discussing those whom he calls the ‘westernizing expatriate# he suggests an interesting additional motive - the natural desire of the immigrant, in search of self-respect and the respect of his new compatriots, to maximize the achievements of his culture of origin and to minimize the differences that distinguish it from the culture of his new home. This insight would appear to he confirmed by Mr. Said's assertion, in a PBS debate in 1977, that the fourteen-centuries-old Islamic tradition and civilization are no more meaningful for the Arab world today than are seventh-century events in Europe for an understanding of present-day America. Experts in Iraq and Iran thought otherwise. Only a few years later, in their war propaganda against each other, both countries daily evoked events and personalities of the seventh century, in the sure knowledge that they would he understood. One does not quite see American contenders for power making a point by .1 rapid allusion to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, the rise of the Carolingians, or the wars of the Lombards. Professor Zakaria's concluding remarks are noteworthy: Orientalism is surely not without blemish, hut the greater danger would be if we denied our faults merely because others speak of them for unobjective purposes. Our cultural task at this stage is to take the hull of backwardness by the horns and criticize ourselves before we criticize the image, even if it is deliberately distorted, that others make of us."